6199 lines
413 KiB
Plaintext
6199 lines
413 KiB
Plaintext
Most of the papers included in this volume have already appeared in one
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or another of the following magazines: _The Atlantic Monthly_, _The
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Dial_, _The New Republic_, _The Seven Arts_, _The Yale Review_, _The
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Columbia University Quarterly_, and are reprinted here with the kind
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permission of the editors.
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Bitter-sweet, and a northwest wind
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To sing his requiem,
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Who was
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Our Age,
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And who becomes
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An imperishable symbol of our ongoing,
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For in himself
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He rose above his body and came among us
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Prophetic of the race,
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The great hater
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Of the dark human deformity
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Which is our dying world,
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The great lover
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Of the spirit of youth
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Which is our future’s seed....
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JAMES OPPENHEIM.
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Randolph Bourne was born in Bloomfield, New Jersey, May 30, 1886.
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He died in New York, December 22, 1918. Between these two dates was
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packed one of the fullest, richest, and most significant lives of the
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younger generation. Its outward events can be summarized in a few
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words. Bourne went to the public schools in his native town, and then
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for some time earned his living as an assistant to a manufacturer of
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automatic piano music. In 1909 he entered Columbia, graduating in 1913
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as holder of the Gilder Fellowship, which enabled him to spend a year
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of study and investigation in Europe. In 1911 he had begun contributing
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to _The Atlantic Monthly_, and his first book, “Youth and Life,” a
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volume of essays, appeared in 1913. He was a member of the contributing
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staff of _The New Republic_ during its first three years; later he
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was a contributing editor of _The Seven Arts_ and _The Dial_. He had
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published, in addition to his first collection of essays and a large
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number of miscellaneous articles and book reviews, two other books,
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“Education and Living” and “The Gary Schools.” At the time of his death
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he was engaged on a novel and a study of the political future.
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It might be guessed from this that Bourne at thirty-two had not quite
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found himself. His interests were indeed almost universal: he had
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written on politics, economics, philosophy, education, literature. No
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other of our younger critics had cast so wide a net, and Bourne had
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hardly begun to draw the strings and count and sort his catch. He was
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a working journalist, a literary freelance with connections often of
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the most precarious kind, who contrived, by daily miracles of audacity
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and courage, to keep himself serenely afloat in a society where his
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convictions prevented him from following any of the ordinary avenues
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of preferment and recognition. It was a feat never to be sufficiently
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marvelled over; it would have been striking, in our twentieth century
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New York, even in the case of a man who was not physically handicapped
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as Bourne was. But such a life is inevitably scattering, and it was
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only after the war had literally driven him in upon himself that he set
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to work at the systematic harvesting of his thoughts and experiences.
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He had not quite found himself, perhaps, owing to the extraordinary
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range of interests for which he had to find a personal common
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denominator; yet no other young American critic, I think, had exhibited
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so clear a tendency, so coherent a body of desires. His personality
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was not only unique, it was also absolutely expressive. I have had the
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delightful experience of reading through at a sitting, so to say, the
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whole mass of his uncollected writings, articles, essays, book reviews,
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unprinted fragments, and a few letters, and I am astonished at the
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way in which, like a ball of camphor in a trunk, the pungent savor of
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the man spreads itself over every paragraph. Here was no anonymous
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reviewer, no mere brilliant satellite of the radical movement losing
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himself in his immediate reactions: one finds everywhere, interwoven in
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the fabric of his work, the silver thread of a personal philosophy, the
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singing line of an intense and beautiful desire.
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What was that desire? It was for a new fellowship in the youth of
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America as the principle of a great and revolutionary departure in our
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life, a league of youth, one might call it, consciously framed with
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the purpose of creating, out of the blind chaos of American society,
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a fine, free, articulate cultural order. That, as it seems to me, was
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the dominant theme of all his effort, the positive theme to which he
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always returned from his thrilling forays into the fields of education
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and politics, philosophy and sociology. One finds it at the beginning
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of his career in such essays as “Our Cultural Humility,” one finds it
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at the end in the “History of a Literary Radical.” One finds it in that
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pacifism which he pursued with such an obstinate and lonely courage and
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which was the logical outcome of the checking and thwarting of those
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currents of thought and feeling in which he had invested the whole
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passion of his life. _Place aux jeunes_ might have been his motto: he
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seemed indeed the flying wedge of the younger generation itself.
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I shall never forget my first meeting with him, that odd little
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apparition with his vibrant eyes, his quick, birdlike steps and the
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long black student’s cape he had brought back with him from Paris.
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It was in November, 1914, and we never imagined then that the war
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was going to be more than a slash, however deep, across the face of
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civilization, we never imagined it was going to plough on and on until
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it had uprooted and turned under the soil so many green shoots of
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hope and desire in the young world. Bourne had published that radiant
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book of essays on the Adventure of Life, the Two Generations, the
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Excitement of Friendship, with its happy and confident suggestion of
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the present as a sort of transparent veil hung up against the window of
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some dazzling future, he had had his wanderyear abroad, and had come
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home with that indescribable air of the scholar-gypsy, his sensibility
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fresh, clairvoyant, matutinal, a philosopher of the _gaya scienza_,
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his hammer poised over the rock of American philistinism, with never
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a doubt in his heart of the waters of youth imprisoned there. One
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divined him in a moment, the fine, mettlesome temper of his intellect,
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his curiosity, his acutely critical self-consciousness, his aesthetic
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flair, his delicate sense of personal relationships, his toughness
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of fiber, his masterly powers of assimilation, his grasp of reality,
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his burning convictions, his beautifully precise desires. Here was
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Emerson’s “American scholar” at last, but radiating an infinitely
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warmer, profaner, more companionable influence than Emerson had ever
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dreamed of, an influence that savored rather of Whitman and William
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James. He was the new America incarnate, with that stamp of a sort of
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permanent youthfulness on his queer, twisted, appealing face. You felt
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that in him the new America had suddenly found itself and was all astir
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with the excitement of its first maturity.
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His life had prepared him for the rôle, for the physical disability
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that had cut him off from the traditional currents and preoccupations
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of American life had given him a poignant insight into the predicament
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of all those others who, like him, could not adjust themselves to the
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industrial machine--the exploited, the sensitive, the despised, the
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aspiring, those, in short, to whom a new and very different America
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was no academic idea but a necessity so urgent that it had begun to be
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a reality. As detached as any young East Sider from the herd-unity of
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American life, the colonial tradition, the “genteel tradition,” yet
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passionately concerned with America, passionately caring for America,
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he had discovered himself at Columbia, where so many strains of the
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newer immigrant population meet one another in the full flood and
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ferment of modern ideas. Shut in as he had been with himself and his
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books, what dreams had passed through his mind of the possibilities of
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life, of the range of adventures that are open to the spirit, of some
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great collective effort of humanity! Would there never be room for
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these things in America, was it not precisely the task of the young to
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make room for them? Bourne’s grandfather and great-grandfather had been
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doughty preachers and reformers: he had inherited a certain religious
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momentum that thrust him now into the midst of the radical tide. Above
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all, he had found companions who helped him to clarify his ideas
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and grapple with his aims. Immigrants, many of them, of the second
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generation, candidates for the “melting-pot” that had simply failed
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to melt them, they trailed with them a dozen rich, diverse racial and
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cultural tendencies which America seemed unable either to assimilate or
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to suppress. Were they not, these newcomers of the eleventh hour, as
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clearly entitled as the first colonials had been to a place in the sun
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of the great experimental democracy upon which they were making such
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strange new demands? They wanted a freer emotional life, a more vivid
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intellectual life; oddly enough, it was they and not the hereditary
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Americans, the “people of action,” who spoke of an “American culture”
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and demanded it. Bourne had found his natural allies. Intensely
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Anglo-Saxon himself, it was America he cared for, not the triumph of
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the Anglo-Saxon tradition which had apparently lost itself in the
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pursuit of a mechanical efficiency. It was a “trans-national” America
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of which he caught glimpses now, a battleground of all the cultures, a
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super-culture, that might perhaps, by some happy chance, determine the
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future of civilization itself.
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It was with some such vision as this that he had gone abroad. If that
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super-culture was ever to come it could only be through some prodigious
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spiritual organization of the youth of America, some organization
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that would have to begin with small and highly self-conscious groups;
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these groups, moreover, would have to depend for a long time upon the
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experience of young Europe. The very ideas of spiritual leadership,
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the intellectual life, the social revolution were foreign to a modern
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America that had submitted to the common mould of business enterprise;
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even philosophers like Professor Dewey had had to assume a protective
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coloration, and when people spoke of art they had to justify it as
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an “asset.” For Bourne, therefore, the European tour was something
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more than a preparation for his own life: he was like a bird in the
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nesting season, gathering twigs and straw for a nest that was not to
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be his but young America’s, a nest for which old America would have
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to provide the bough! He was in search, in other words, of new ideas,
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new attitudes, new techniques, personal and social, for which he was
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going to demand recognition at home, and it is this that gives to his
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“Impressions of Europe 1913-1914”--his report to Columbia as holder
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of the Gilder Fellowship--an actuality that so perfectly survives the
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war. Where can one find anything better in the way of social insight
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than his pictures of radical France, of the ferment of the young
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Italian soul, of the London intellectuals--Sidney Webb, lecturing
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“with the patient air of a man expounding arithmetic to backward
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children,” Shaw, “clean, straight, clear, and fine as an upland wind
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and summer sun,” Chesterton, “gluttonous and thick, with something
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tricky and unsavory about him”; of the Scandinavian note,--“one got
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a sense in those countries of the most advanced civilization, yet
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without sophistication, a luminous modern intelligence that selected
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and controlled and did not allow itself to be overwhelmed by the chaos
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of twentieth century possibility”? We see things in that white light
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only when they have some deeply personal meaning for us, and Bourne’s
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instinct had led him straight to his mark. Two complex impressions
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he had gained that were to dominate all his later work. One was
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the sense of what a national culture is, of its immense value and
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significance as a source and fund of spiritual power even in a young
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world committed to a political and economic internationalism. The
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other was a keen realization of the almost apostolic rôle of the young
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student class in perpetuating, rejuvenating, vivifying and, if need be,
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creating this national consciousness. No young Hindu ever went back
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to India, no young Persian or Ukrainian or Balkan student ever went
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home from a European year with a more fervent sense of the chaos and
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spiritual stagnation and backwardness of his own people, of the happy
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responsibility laid upon himself and all those other young men and
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women who had been touched by the modern spirit.
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It was a tremendous moment. Never had we realized so keenly the
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spiritual inadequacy of American life: the great war of the cultures
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left us literally gasping in the vacuum of our own provincialism,
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colonialism, naïveté, and romantic self-complacency. We were in
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much the same position as that of the Scandinavian countries during
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the European wars of 1866-1870, if we are to accept George Brandes’
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description of it: “While the intellectual life languished, as a plant
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droops in a close, confined place, the people were self-satisfied. They
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rested on their laurels and fell into a doze. And while they dozed
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they had dreams. The cultivated, and especially the half-cultivated,
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public in Denmark and Norway dreamed that they were the salt of Europe.
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They dreamed that by their idealism they would regenerate the foreign
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nations. They dreamed that they were the free, mighty North, which
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would lead the cause of the peoples to victory--and they woke up
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unfree, impotent, ignorant.” It was through a great effort of social
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introspection that Scandinavia had roused itself from the stupor of
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this optimistic idealism, and at last a similar movement was on foot in
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America. _The New Republic_ had started with the war, _The Masses_ was
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still young, _The Seven Arts_ and the new _Dial_ were on the horizon.
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Bourne found himself instantly in touch with the purposes of all these
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papers, which spoke of a new class-consciousness, a sort of offensive
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and defensive alliance of the younger intelligentsia and the awakened
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elements of the labor groups. His audience was awaiting him, and no one
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could have been better prepared to take advantage of it.
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It was not merely the exigencies of journalism that turned his mind at
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first so largely to the problems of primary education. In Professor
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Dewey’s theories, in the Gary Schools, he saw, as he could see it
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nowhere else, the definite promise, the actual unfolding of the freer,
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more individualistic, and at the same time more communistic social life
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of which he dreamed. But even if he had not come to feel a certain
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inadequacy in Professor Dewey’s point of view, I doubt if this field
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of interest could have held him long. Children fascinated him; how
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well he understood them we can see from his delightful “Ernest: or
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Parent for a Day.” But Bourne’s heart was too insistently involved
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in the situation of his own contemporaries, in the stress of their
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immediate problems, to allow him to linger in these long hopes. This
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young intelligentsia in whose ultimate unity he had had such faith--did
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he not see it, moreover, as the war advanced, lapsing, falling apart
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again, reverting into the ancestral attitudes of the tribe? Granted the
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war, it was the business of these liberals to see that it was played,
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as he said, “with insistent care for democratic values at home, and
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unequivocal alliance with democratic elements abroad for a peace that
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should promise more than a mere union of benevolent imperialisms.”
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Instead, the “allure of the martial” passed only to be succeeded by
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the “allure of the technical,” and the “prudent, enlightened college
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man,” cut in the familiar pattern, took the place of the value-creator,
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the path-finder, the seeker of new horizons. Plainly, the younger
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generation had not begun to find its own soul, had hardly so much as
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registered its will for a new orientation of the American spirit.
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Had it not occurred before, this general reversion to type? The
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whole first phase of the social movement had spent itself in a sort
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of ineffectual beating of the air, and Bourne saw that only through
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a far more heroic effort of criticism than had yet been attempted
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could the young intelligentsia disentangle itself, prevail against
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the mass-fatalism of the middle class, and rouse the workers out of
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their blindness and apathy. Fifteen years ago a new breath had blown
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over the American scene; people felt that the era of big business had
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reached its climacteric, that a new nation was about to be born out
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of the social settlements, out of the soil that had been harrowed and
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swept by the muck-rakers, out of the spirit of service that animated
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a whole new race of novelists, and a vast army of young men and young
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women, who felt fluttering in their souls the call to some great
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impersonal adventure, went forth to the slums and the factories and
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the universities with a powerful but very vague desire to realize
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themselves and to “do something” for the world. But one would have
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said that movement had been born middle-aged, so earnest, so anxious,
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so conscientious, so troubled, so maternal and paternal were the faces
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of those young men and women who marched forth with so puzzled an
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intrepidity; there was none of the tang and fire of youth in it, none
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of the fierce glitter of the intellect; there was no joyous burning
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of boats; there were no transfigurations, no ecstasies. There was
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only a warm simmer of eager, evangelical sentiment that somehow never
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reached the boiling-point and cooled rapidly off again, and that host
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of tentative and wistful seekers found themselves as cruelly astray
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as the little visionaries of the Children’s Crusade. Was not the
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failure of that movement due almost wholly to its lack of critical
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equipment? In the first place, it was too naïve and too provincial,
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it was outside the main stream of modern activity and desire, it had
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none of the reserves of power that result from being in touch with
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contemporary developments in other countries. In the second place, it
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had no realistic sense of American life: it ignored the facts of the
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class struggle, it accepted enthusiastically illusions like that of
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the “melting-pot,” it wasted its energy in attacking “bad” business
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without realizing that the spirit of business enterprise is itself
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the great enemy, it failed to see the need of a consciously organized
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intellectual class or to appreciate the necessary conjunction in our
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day of the intellectuals and the proletariat. Worst of all, it had no
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personal psychology. Those crusaders of the “social consciousness”
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were far from being conscious of themselves; they had never broken the
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umbilical cord of their hereditary class, they had not discovered their
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own individual lines of growth, they had no knowledge of their own
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powers, no technique for using them effectively. Embarked in activities
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that instantly revealed themselves as futile and fallacious, they
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also found their loyalties in perpetual conflict with one another.
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Inevitably their zeal waned and their energy ebbed away, and the tides
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of uniformity and commercialism swept the American scene once more.
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No one had grasped all these elements of the social situation so firmly
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as Bourne. He saw that we needed, first, a psychological interpretation
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of these younger malcontents, secondly, a realistic study of our
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institutional life, and finally, a general opening of the American
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mind to the currents of contemporary desire and effort and experiment
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abroad. And along each of these lines he did the work of a pioneer.
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Who, for example, had ever thought of exploring the soul of the
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younger generation as Bourne explored it? He had planned a long
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series of literary portraits of its types and personalities: half
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a dozen of them exist (along with several of quite a different
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character!--the keenest satires we have), enough to show us how
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sensitively he responded to those detached, groping, wistful, yet
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resolutely independent spirits whom he saw weaving the iridescent
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fabric of the future. He who had so early divined the truth of Maurice
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Barrès’ saying, that we never conquer the intellectual suffrages of
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those who precede us in life, addressed himself exclusively to these
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young spirits: he went out to meet them, he probed their obscurities;
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one would have said that he was a sort of impresario gathering the
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personnel of some immense orchestra, seeking in each the principle
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of his own growth. He had studied his chosen minority with such
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instinctive care that everything he wrote came as a personal message to
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those, and those alone, who were capable of assimilating it; and that
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is why, as we look over his writings to-day, we find them a sort of
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corpus, a text full of secret ciphers, and packed with meaning between
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the lines, of all the most intimate questions and difficulties and
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turns of thought and feeling that make up the soul of young America.
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He revealed us to ourselves, he intensified and at the same time
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corroborated our desires; above all, he showed us what we had in common
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and what new increments of life might arise out of the friction of our
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differences. In these portraits he was already doing the work of the
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novelist he might well have become,--he left two or three chapters
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of a novel he had begun to write, in which “Karen” and “Sophronisba”
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and “The Professor” would probably have appeared, along with a whole
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battle-array of the older and younger generations; he was sketching
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out the rôle some novelist might play in the parturition of the new
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America. Everything for analysis, for self-discovery, for articulation,
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everything to put the younger generation in possession of itself!
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||
Everything to weave the tissue of a common understanding, to help the
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||
growth and freedom of the spirit! There was something prophetic in
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||
Bourne’s personality. In his presence one felt, in his writings one
|
||
realizes, that the army of youth is already assembling for “the effort
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of reason and the adventure of beauty.”
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||
I shall say little of his work as a critic of institutions. It
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is enough to point out that if such realistic studies as his
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“Trans-National America” and his “Mirror of the Middle West” (a
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perfect example, by the way, of his theory of the book review as an
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||
independent enquiry with a central idea of its own), his papers on the
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settlements and on sociological fiction had appeared fifteen years
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||
ago, a vastly greater amount of effective energy might have survived
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||
the break-up of the first phase of the social movement. When he showed
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||
what mare’s-nests the settlements and the “melting-pot” theory and
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the “spirit of service” are, and what snares for democracy lie in
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||
Meredith Nicholson’s “folksiness,” he closed the gate on half the blind
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alleys in which youth had gone astray; and he who had so delighted
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||
in Veblen’s ruthless condensation of the mystical gases of American
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business implied in every line he wrote that there is a gulf fixed
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||
between the young intellectual and the unreformable “system.” The young
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intellectual, henceforth, was an unclassed outsider, with a scent
|
||
all the more keenly sharpened for new trails because the old trails
|
||
were denied him, and for Bourne those new trails led straight, and by
|
||
the shortest possible route, to a society the very reverse of ours,
|
||
a society such as A.E. has described in the phrase, “democratic in
|
||
economics, aristocratic in thought,” to be attained through a coalition
|
||
of the thinkers and the workers. The task of the thinkers, of the
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||
intelligentsia, in so far as they concerned themselves directly with
|
||
economic problems, was, in Bourne’s eyes, chiefly to _think_. It was a
|
||
new doctrine for American radicals; it precisely denoted their advance
|
||
over the evangelicism of fifteen years ago. “The young radical to-day,”
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||
he wrote in one of his reviews, “is not asked to be a martyr, but he is
|
||
asked to be a thinker, an intellectual leader.... The labor movement in
|
||
this country needs a philosophy, a literature, a constructive socialist
|
||
analysis and criticism of industrial relations. Labor will scarcely do
|
||
this thinking for itself. Unless middle-class radicalism threshes out
|
||
its categories and interpretations and undertakes this constructive
|
||
thought it will not be done.... The only way by which middle-class
|
||
radicalism can serve is by being fiercely and concentratedly
|
||
intellectual.”
|
||
Finally, through Bourne more than through any other of our younger
|
||
writers one gained a sense of the stir of the great world, of the
|
||
currents and cross-currents of the contemporary European spirit,
|
||
behind and beneath the war, of the tendencies and experiences and
|
||
common aims and bonds of the younger generation everywhere. He was an
|
||
exception to what seems to be the general rule, that Americans who
|
||
are able to pass outside their own national spirit at all are apt to
|
||
fall headlong into the national spirit of some one other country:
|
||
they become vehement partisans of Latin Europe, or of England, or of
|
||
Germany and Scandinavia, or, more recently, of Russia. Bourne, with
|
||
that singular union of detachment and affectionate penetration which
|
||
he brought also to his personal relationships, had entered them all
|
||
with an equal curiosity, an impartial delight. If he had absorbed the
|
||
fine idealism of the English liberals, he understood also the more
|
||
elemental, the more emotional, the more positive urge of revolutionary
|
||
Russia. He was full of practical suggestions from the vast social and
|
||
economic laboratory of modern Germany. He had caught something also
|
||
from the intellectual excitement of young Italy; most of all, his
|
||
imagination had been captivated, as we can see from such essays as
|
||
“Mon Amie,” by the candor and the self-consciousness and the genius
|
||
for social introspection of radical France. And all these influences
|
||
were perpetually at play in his mind and in his writings. He was the
|
||
conductor of innumerable diverse inspirations, a sort of clearing-house
|
||
of the best living ideas of the time; through him the young writer and
|
||
the young thinker came into instant contact with whatever in the modern
|
||
world he most needed. And here again Bourne revealed his central aim.
|
||
He reviewed by choice, and with a special passion, what he called the
|
||
“epics of youthful talent that grows great with quest and desire.” It
|
||
is easy to see, in his articles on such books as “Pelle the Conqueror”
|
||
and Gorky’s Autobiography and “The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists,”
|
||
that what lured him was the common struggle and aspiration of youth
|
||
and poverty and the creative spirit everywhere, the sense of a new
|
||
socialized world groping its way upward. It was this rich ground-note
|
||
in all his work that made him, not the critic merely, but the leader.
|
||
It is impossible to say, of course, what he would have become if
|
||
his life had been spared. The war had immensely stimulated his
|
||
“political-mindedness”: he was obsessed, during the last two years of
|
||
his life, with a sense of the precariousness of free thought and free
|
||
speech in this country; if they were cut off, he foresaw, the whole
|
||
enterprise, both of the social revolution and of the new American
|
||
culture, would perish of inanition; he felt himself at bay. Would he,
|
||
with all the additional provocation of a hopelessly bungled peace
|
||
settlement, have continued in the political field, as his unfinished
|
||
study on “The State” might suggest? Or would that activity, while
|
||
remaining vivid and consistent, have subsided into a second place
|
||
behind his more purely cultural interests?
|
||
Personally, I like to think that he would have followed this second
|
||
course. He speaks in the “History of a Literary Radical” of “living
|
||
down the new orthodoxies of propaganda” as he and his friends had lived
|
||
down the old orthodoxies of the classics, and I believe that, freed
|
||
from the obsessions of the war, his criticism would have concentrated
|
||
more and more on the problem of evoking and shaping an American
|
||
literature as the nucleus of that rich, vital and independent national
|
||
life he had been seeking in so many ways to promote. Who that knew his
|
||
talents could have wished it otherwise? Already, except for the poets,
|
||
the intellectual energy of the younger generation has been drawn almost
|
||
exclusively into political interests; and the new era, which has begun
|
||
to draw so sharply the battle-line between radicals and reactionaries,
|
||
is certain only to increase this tendency. If our literary criticism
|
||
is always impelled sooner or later to become social criticism, it is
|
||
certainly because the future of our literature and art depends upon the
|
||
wholesale reconstruction of a social life all the elements of which are
|
||
as if united in a sort of conspiracy against the growth and freedom of
|
||
the spirit: we are in the position described by Ibsen in one of his
|
||
letters: “I do not think it is of much use to plead the cause of art
|
||
with arguments derived from its own nature, which with us is still so
|
||
little understood, or rather so thoroughly misunderstood.... My opinion
|
||
is that at the present time it is of no use to wield one’s weapons
|
||
_for_ art; one must simply turn them _against_ what is hostile to
|
||
art.” That is why Bourne, whose ultimate interest was always artistic,
|
||
found himself a guerilla fighter along the whole battlefront of the
|
||
social revolution. He was drawn into the political arena as a skilful
|
||
specialist, called into war service, is drawn into the practice of a
|
||
general surgery in which he may indeed accomplish much but at the price
|
||
of the suspension of his own uniqueness. Others, at the expiration
|
||
of what was for him a critical moment, the moment when all freedom
|
||
seemed to be at stake, might have been trusted to do his political
|
||
work for him; the whole radical tide was flowing behind him; his
|
||
unique function, meanwhile, was not political but spiritual. It was
|
||
the creation, the communication of what he called “the allure of fresh
|
||
and true ideas, of free speculation, of artistic vigor, of cultural
|
||
styles, of intelligence suffused by feeling and feeling given fiber and
|
||
outline by intelligence.” Was it not to have been hoped, therefore,
|
||
that he would have revived, exemplified among these new revolutionary
|
||
conditions, and on behalf of them, the lapsed rôle of the man of
|
||
letters?
|
||
For if he held a hammer in one hand, he held in the other a
|
||
divining-rod. He, if any one, in the days to come, would have
|
||
conjured out of our dry soil the green shoots of a beautiful and a
|
||
characteristic literature: he knew that soil so well, and why it was
|
||
dry, and how it ought to be irrigated! We have had no chart of our
|
||
cultural situation to compare with his “History of a Literary Radical,”
|
||
and certainly no one has combined with an analytical gift like his,
|
||
and an adoration for the instinct of workmanship, so burning an eye
|
||
for every stir of life and color on the drab American landscape. I
|
||
think of a sentence in one of his reviews: “The appearance of dramatic
|
||
imagination in any form in this country is something to make us all
|
||
drop our work and run to see.” That was the spirit which animated all
|
||
his criticism: is it not the spirit that creates out of the void the
|
||
thing it contemplates?
|
||
To have known Randolph Bourne is indeed to have surprised some of the
|
||
finest secrets of the American future. But those who lived with him in
|
||
friendship will remember him for reasons that are far more personal,
|
||
and at the same time far more universal, than that: they will remember
|
||
him as the wondrous companion, the lyrical intellect, the transparent
|
||
idealist, most of all perhaps as the ingenuous and lonely child. It is
|
||
said that every writer possesses in his vocabulary one talismanic word
|
||
which he repeats again and again, half unconsciously, like a sort of
|
||
signature, and which reveals the essential secret of his personality.
|
||
In Bourne’s case the word is “wistful”; and those who accused him
|
||
of malice and bitterness, not realizing how instinctively we impute
|
||
these qualities to the physically deformed who are so dauntless in
|
||
spirit that they repel our pity, would do well to consider that secret
|
||
signature, sown like some beautiful wild flower over the meadow of
|
||
his writings, which no man can counterfeit, which is indeed the token
|
||
of their inviolable sincerity. He was a wanderer, the child of some
|
||
nation yet unborn, smitten with an inappeasable nostalgia for the
|
||
Beloved Community on the far side of socialism, he carried with him the
|
||
intoxicating air of that community, the mysterious aroma of all its
|
||
works and ways. “High philosophic thought infused with sensuous love,”
|
||
he wrote once, “is not this the one incorrigible dream that clutches
|
||
us?” It was the dream he had brought back from the bright future in
|
||
which he lived, the dream he summoned us to realize. And it issues now
|
||
like a gallant command out of the space left vacant by his passing.
|
||
For a man of culture, my friend Miro began his literary career in a
|
||
singularly unpromising way. Potential statesmen in log-cabins might
|
||
miraculously come in touch with all the great books of the world, but
|
||
the days of Miro’s young school life were passed in innocence of Homer
|
||
or Dante or Shakespeare, or any of the other traditional mind-formers
|
||
of the race. What Miro had for his nourishment, outside the Bible,
|
||
which was a magical book that you must not drop on the floor, or his
|
||
school-readers, which were like lightning flashes of unintelligible
|
||
scenes, was the literature that his playmates lent him--exploits of
|
||
British soldiers in Spain and the Crimea, the death-defying adventures
|
||
of young filibusters in Cuba and Nicaragua. Miro gave them a languid
|
||
perusing, and did not criticize their literary style. Huckleberry Finn
|
||
and Tom Sawyer somehow eluded him until he had finished college, and
|
||
no fresher tale of adventure drifted into his complacent home until
|
||
the era of “Richard Carvel” and “Janice Meredith” sharpened his wits
|
||
and gave him a vague feeling that there was such a thing as literary
|
||
art. The classics were stiffly enshrined behind glass doors that were
|
||
very hard to open--at least Hawthorne and Irving and Thackeray were
|
||
there, and Tennyson’s and Scott’s poems--but nobody ever discussed them
|
||
or looked at them. Miro’s busy elders were taken up with the weekly
|
||
_Outlook_ and _Independent_ and _Christian Work_, and felt they were
|
||
doing much for Miro when they provided him and his sister with _St.
|
||
Nicholas_ and _The Youth’s Companion_. It was only that Miro saw the
|
||
black books looking at him accusingly from the case, and a rudimentary
|
||
conscience, slipping easily over from Calvinism to culture, forced
|
||
him solemnly to grapple with “The Scarlet Letter” or “Marmion.” All
|
||
he remembers is that the writers of these books he browsed among used
|
||
a great many words and made a great fuss over shadowy offenses and
|
||
conflicts and passions that did not even stimulate his imagination with
|
||
sufficient force to cause him to ask his elders what it was all about.
|
||
Certainly the filibusters were easier.
|
||
At school Miro was early impressed with the vast dignity of the
|
||
literary works and names he was compelled to learn. Shakespeare and
|
||
Goethe and Dante lifted their plaster heads frowningly above the
|
||
teacher’s, as they perched on shelves about the room. Much was said
|
||
of the greatness of literature. But the art of phonetics and the
|
||
complications of grammar swamped Miro’s early school years. It was not
|
||
until he reached the High School that literature began really to assume
|
||
that sacredness which he had heretofore felt only for Holy Scripture.
|
||
His initiation into culture was made almost a religious mystery by the
|
||
conscientious and harassed teacher. As the Deadwood Boys and Henty
|
||
and David Harum slipped away from Miro’s soul in the presence of
|
||
Milton’s “Comus” and Burke “On Conciliation,” a cultural devoutness
|
||
was engendered in him that never really died. At first it did not take
|
||
Miro beyond the stage where your conscience is strong enough to make
|
||
you uncomfortable, but not strong enough to make you do anything about
|
||
it. Miro did not actually become an omnivorous reader of great books.
|
||
But he was filled with a rich grief that the millions pursued cheap and
|
||
vulgar fiction instead of the best that has been thought and said in
|
||
the world. Miro indiscriminately bought cheap editions of the English
|
||
classics and read them with a certain patient incomprehension.
|
||
As for the dead classics, they came to Miro from the hands of his
|
||
teachers with a prestige even vaster than the books of his native
|
||
tongue. No doubt ever entered his head that four years of Latin and
|
||
three years of Greek, an hour a day, were the important preparation he
|
||
needed for his future as an American citizen. No doubt ever hurt him
|
||
that the world into which he would pass would be a world where, as his
|
||
teacher said, Latin and Greek were a solace to the aged, a quickener
|
||
of taste, a refreshment after manual labor, and a clue to the general
|
||
knowledge of all human things. Miro would as soon have doubted the
|
||
rising of the sun as have doubted the wisdom of these serious, puckered
|
||
women who had the precious manipulation of his cultural upbringing in
|
||
their charge. Miro was a bright, if a rather vague, little boy, and a
|
||
fusion of brightness and docility gave him high marks in the school
|
||
where we went together.
|
||
No one ever doubted that these marks expressed Miro’s assimilation
|
||
of the books we pored over. But he told me later that he had never
|
||
really known what he was studying. Cæsar, Virgil, Cicero, Xenophon,
|
||
Homer, were veiled and misty experiences to him. His mind was a moving
|
||
present, obliterating each day what it had read the day before, and
|
||
piercing into a no more comprehended future. He could at no time have
|
||
given any intelligible account of Æneas’s wanderings or what Cicero was
|
||
really inveighing against. The Iliad was even more obscure. The only
|
||
thing which impressed him deeply was an expurgated passage, which he
|
||
looked up somewhere else and found to be about Mars and Venus caught
|
||
in the golden bed. Cæsar seemed to be at war, and Xenophon wandering
|
||
somewhere in Asia Minor, with about the same lengthiness and hardship
|
||
as Miro suffered in reading him. The trouble, Miro thought afterwards,
|
||
was that these books were to his mind flickering lights in a vast
|
||
jungle of ignorance. He does not remember marvelling at the excessive
|
||
dulness of the stories themselves. He plodded his faithful way, using
|
||
them as his conscientious teachers did, as exercises in language. He
|
||
looked on Virgil and Cicero as essentially problems in disentangling
|
||
words which had unaccountably gotten into a bizarre order, and in
|
||
recognizing certain rather amusing and ingenious combinations, known as
|
||
“constructions.” Why these words took so irritating an order Miro never
|
||
knew, but he always connected the problem with those algebraic puzzles
|
||
he had elsewhere to unravel. Virgil’s words were further complicated
|
||
by being arranged in lines which one had to “scan.” Miro was pleased
|
||
with the rhythm, and there were stanzas that had a roll of their own.
|
||
But the inexorable translating that had to go on tore all this fabric
|
||
of poetry to pieces. His translations were impeccable, but, as he never
|
||
wrote them down, he had never before his eyes the consecutive story.
|
||
Translations Miro never saw. He knew that they were implements of
|
||
deadly sin that boys used to cheat with. His horror of them was such
|
||
as a saint might feel towards a parody of the Bible. Just before Miro
|
||
left school, his sister in a younger class began to read a prose
|
||
translation of the Odyssey, and Miro remembers the scorn with which he
|
||
looked down on so sneaking an entrance into the temple of light. He
|
||
knew that not everyone could study Latin and Greek, and he learned to
|
||
be proud of his knowledge. When at last he had passed his examinations
|
||
for college--his Latin composition and grammar, his syntax and his
|
||
sight-reading, and his Greek composition and grammar, his Greek syntax
|
||
and sight-reading, and his translation of Gallic battles and Anabatic
|
||
frosts, and Dido’s farewell and Cicero’s objurgations--his zealous
|
||
rage did not abate. He even insisted on reading the Bucolics, while he
|
||
was away on his vacation, and a book or two in the Odyssey. His family
|
||
was a little chilled by his studiousness, but he knew well that he was
|
||
laying up cultural treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not
|
||
corrupt, neither do thieves break in and steal.
|
||
Arrived at college, Miro expanded his cultural interests on the
|
||
approved lines. He read Horace and Plato, Lysias and Terence,
|
||
impartially, with faithful conscience. Horace was the most exciting
|
||
because of the parodies that were beginning to appear in the cleverer
|
||
newspapers. Miro scarcely knew whether to be amused or shocked at “Odi
|
||
Persicos” or “Integer Vitæ” done into current slang. The professors,
|
||
mild-mannered men who knew their place and kept it, never mentioned
|
||
these impudent adventures, but for Miro it was the first crack in
|
||
his Ptolemaic system of reverences. There came a time when his mind
|
||
began to feel replete, when this heavy pushing through the opaque
|
||
medium of dead language began to fatigue him. He should have been able
|
||
to read fluently, but there were always turning up new styles, new
|
||
constructions, to plague him. Latin became to him like a constant diet
|
||
of beefsteak, and Greek like a constant diet of fine wheaten bread.
|
||
They lost their taste. These witty poets and ostentatious orators--what
|
||
were they all about? What was their background? Where did they fit
|
||
into Miro’s life? The professors knew some history, but what did that
|
||
history mean? Miro found himself surfeited and dissatisfied. He began
|
||
to look furtively at translations to get some better English than he
|
||
was able to provide. The hair-splittings of Plato began to bore him
|
||
when he saw them in crystal-clear English, and not muffled in the
|
||
original Greek. His apostasy had begun.
|
||
It was not much better in his study of English literature. Miro
|
||
was given a huge anthology, a sort of press-clipping bureau of
|
||
_belles-lettres_, from Chaucer to Arthur Symons. Under the direction
|
||
of a professor who was laying out a career for himself as poet--or
|
||
“modern singer,” as he expressed it--the class went briskly through
|
||
the centuries sampling their genius and tasting the various literary
|
||
flavors. The enterprise reminded Miro of those books of woollen samples
|
||
which one looks through when one is to have a suit of clothes made.
|
||
But in this case, the student did not even have the pleasure of seeing
|
||
the suit of clothes. All that was expected of him, apparently, was
|
||
that he should become familiar, from these microscopic pieces, with
|
||
the different textures and patterns. The great writers passed before
|
||
his mind like figures in a crowded street. There was no time for
|
||
preferences. Indeed the professor strove diligently to give each writer
|
||
his just due. How was one to appreciate the great thoughts and the
|
||
great styles if one began to choose violently between them, or attempt
|
||
any discrimination on grounds of their peculiar congeniality for
|
||
one’s own soul? Criticism had to spurn such subjectivity, scholarship
|
||
could not be wilful. The neatly arranged book of “readings,” with its
|
||
medicinal doses of inspiration, became the symbol of Miro’s education.
|
||
These early years of college did not deprive Miro of his cultural
|
||
loyalty, but they deadened his appetite. Although almost inconceivably
|
||
docile, he found himself being bored. He had come from school a
|
||
serious boy, with more than a touch of priggishness in him, and a
|
||
vague aspiration to be a “man of letters.” He found himself becoming
|
||
a collector of literary odds-and-ends. If he did not formulate this
|
||
feeling clearly, he at least knew. He found that the literary life was
|
||
not as interesting as he had expected. He sought no adventures. When he
|
||
wrote, it was graceful lyrics or polite criticisms of William Collins
|
||
or Charles Lamb. These canonized saints of culture still held the field
|
||
for Miro, however. There was nothing between them and that popular
|
||
literature of the day that all good men bemoaned. Classic or popular,
|
||
“highbrow” or “lowbrow,” this was the choice, and Miro unquestioningly
|
||
took the orthodox heaven. In 1912 the most popular of Miro’s English
|
||
professors had never heard of Galsworthy, and another was creating a
|
||
flurry of scandal in the department by recommending Chesterton to his
|
||
classes. It would scarcely have been in college that Miro would have
|
||
learned of an escape from the closed dichotomy of culture. Bored with
|
||
the “classic,” and frozen with horror at the “popular,” his career as
|
||
a man of culture must have come to a dragging end if he had not been
|
||
suddenly liberated by a chance lecture which he happened to hear while
|
||
he was at home for the holidays.
|
||
The literary radical who appeared before the Lyceum Club of Miro’s
|
||
village was none other than Professor William Lyon Phelps, and it is
|
||
to that evening of cultural audacity Miro thinks he owes all his later
|
||
emancipation. The lecturer grappled with the “modern novel,” and tossed
|
||
Hardy, Tolstoi, Turgenev, Meredith, even Trollope, into the minds of
|
||
the charmed audience with such effect that the virgin shelves of the
|
||
village library were ravished for days to come by the eager minds upon
|
||
whom these great names dawned for the first time. “Jude the Obscure”
|
||
and “Resurrection” were of course kept officially away from the vulgar,
|
||
but Miro managed to find “Smoke” and “Virgin Soil” and “Anna Karenina”
|
||
and “The Warden” and “A Pair of Blue Eyes” and “The Return of the
|
||
Native.” Later at college he explored the forbidden realms. It was as
|
||
if some devout and restless saint had suddenly been introduced to the
|
||
Apocrypha. A new world was opened to Miro that was neither “classic”
|
||
nor “popular,” and yet which came to one under the most unimpeachable
|
||
auspices. There was, at first, it is true, an air of illicit adventure
|
||
about the enterprise. The lecturer who made himself the missionary of
|
||
such vigorous and piquant doctrine had the air of being a heretic, or
|
||
at least a boy playing out of school. But Miro himself returned to
|
||
college a cultural revolutionist. His orthodoxies crumbled. He did not
|
||
try to reconcile the new with the old. He applied pick and dynamite to
|
||
the whole structure of the canon. Irony, humor, tragedy, sensuality,
|
||
suddenly appeared to him as literary qualities in forms that he could
|
||
understand. They were like oxygen to his soul.
|
||
If these qualities were in the books he had been reading, he had never
|
||
felt them. The expurgated sample-books he had studied had passed too
|
||
swiftly over the Elizabethans to give him a sense of their lustiness.
|
||
Miro immersed himself voluptuously in the pessimism of Hardy. He fed on
|
||
the poignant torture of Tolstoi. While he was reading “Resurrection,”
|
||
his class in literature was making an “intensive” study of Tennyson.
|
||
It was too much. Miro rose in revolt. He forswore literary courses
|
||
forever, dead rituals in which anæmic priests mumbled their trite
|
||
critical commentary. Miro did not know that to naughtier critics even
|
||
Mr. Phelps might eventually seem a pale and timid Gideon, himself stuck
|
||
in moral sloughs. He was grateful enough for that blast of trumpets
|
||
which made his own scholastic walls fall down.
|
||
The next stage in Miro’s cultural life was one of frank revolt. He
|
||
became as violent as a heretic as he had been docile as a believer.
|
||
Modern novels merely started the rift that widened into modern
|
||
ideas. The professors were of little use. Indeed, when Miro joined a
|
||
group of radicals who had started a new college paper, a relentless
|
||
vendetta began with the teachers. Miro and his friends threw over
|
||
everything that was mere literature. Social purpose must shine from
|
||
any writing that was to rouse their enthusiasm. Literary flavor was
|
||
to be permissible only where it made vivid high and revolutionary
|
||
thought. Tolstoi became their god, Wells their high priest. Chesterton
|
||
infuriated them. They wrote violent assaults upon him which began in
|
||
imitation of his cool paradoxicality and ended in incoherent ravings.
|
||
There were so many enemies to their new fervor that they scarcely knew
|
||
where to begin. There were not only the old tables of stone to destroy,
|
||
but there were new and threatening prophets of the eternal verities who
|
||
had to be exposed. The nineteenth century which they had studied must
|
||
be weeded of its nauseous moralists. The instructors consulted together
|
||
how they might put down the revolt, and bring these sinners back to the
|
||
faith of cultural scripture.
|
||
It was of no avail. In a short time Miro had been converted from an
|
||
aspiration for the career of a cultivated “man of letters” to a fiery
|
||
zeal for artistic and literary propaganda in the service of radical
|
||
ideas. One of the results of this conversion was the discovery that he
|
||
really had no standards of critical taste. Miro had been reverential
|
||
so long that he had felt no preferences. Everything that was classic
|
||
had to be good to him. But now that he had thrown away the books that
|
||
were stamped with the mark of the classic mint, and was dealing with
|
||
the raw materials of letters, he had to become a critic and make
|
||
selection. It was not enough that a book should be radical. Some of
|
||
the books he read, though impeccably revolutionary as to ideas, were
|
||
clearly poor as literature. His muffled taste began to assert itself.
|
||
He found himself impressionable where before he had been only mildly
|
||
acquisitive. The literature of revolt and free speculation fired him
|
||
into a state of spiritual explosiveness. All that he read now stood out
|
||
in brighter colors and in sharper outlines than before. As he reached a
|
||
better balance, he began to feel the vigor of literary form, the value
|
||
of sincerity and freshness of style. He began to look for them keenly
|
||
in everything he read. It was long before Miro realized that enthusiasm
|
||
not docility had made him critical. He became a little proud of his
|
||
sensitive and discriminating reactions to the modern and the unsifted.
|
||
This pursuit had to take place without any help from the college.
|
||
After Miro graduated, it is true that it became the fashion to study
|
||
literature as the record of ideas and not merely as a canon of sacred
|
||
books to be analyzed, commented upon, and absorbed. But no dent was
|
||
made upon the system in Miro’s time, and, the inventory of English
|
||
criticism not going beyond Stevenson, no college course went beyond
|
||
Stevenson. The Elizabethans had been exhumed and fumigated, but the
|
||
most popular attention went to the gallery of Victorians, who combined
|
||
moral soundness with literary beauty, and were therefore considered
|
||
wholesome food for young men. The instructors all remained in the state
|
||
of reverence which saw all things good that had been immemorially
|
||
taught. Miro’s own teacher was a fragile, earnest young man, whose
|
||
robuster parents had evidently seized upon his nature as a fortunate
|
||
pledge of what the family might produce in the way of an intellectual
|
||
flower that should surpass in culture and gentility the ambitions of
|
||
his parents. His studiousness, hopeless for his father’s career as
|
||
grocer, had therefore been capitalized into education.
|
||
The product now shone forth as one of the most successful and
|
||
promising younger instructors in the department. He knew his subject.
|
||
Card-indexes filled his room, covering in detail the works, lives,
|
||
and deaths of the illustrious persons whom he expounded, as well as
|
||
everything that had been said about them in the way of appreciation or
|
||
interpretation. An endless number of lectures and courses could be
|
||
made from this bountiful store. He never tried to write himself, but he
|
||
knew all about the different kinds of writing, and when he corrected
|
||
the boys’ themes he knew infallibly what to tell them to avoid. Miro’s
|
||
vagaries scandalized his teacher all the more because during his first
|
||
year in college Miro had been generally noticed as one with the proper
|
||
sobriety and scholarly patience to graduate into a similar priestly
|
||
calling. Miro found scant sympathy in the young man. To the latter,
|
||
literary studies were a science not an art, and they were to be treated
|
||
with somewhat the same cold rigor of delimitation and analysis as
|
||
any other science. Miro felt his teacher’s recoil at the idea that
|
||
literature was significant only as the expression of personality or
|
||
as interpretation of some social movement. Miro saw how uneasy he
|
||
became when he was confronted with current literature. It was clear
|
||
that Miro’s slowly growing critical sense had not a counterpart in the
|
||
scholastic mind.
|
||
When Miro and his friends abandoned literary studies, they followed
|
||
after the teachers of history and philosophy, intellectual arenas of
|
||
which the literary professors seemed scandalously ignorant. At this
|
||
ignorance Miro boiled with contempt. Here were the profitable clues
|
||
that would give meaning to dusty literary scholarship, but the scholars
|
||
had not the wits to seize them. They lived along, playing what seemed
|
||
to Miro a rather dreary game, when they were not gaping reverently at
|
||
ideas and forms which they scarcely had the genuine personality to
|
||
appreciate. Miro felt once and for all free of these mysteries and
|
||
reverences. He was to know the world as it has been and as it is. He
|
||
was to put literature into its proper place, making all “culture”
|
||
serve its apprenticeship for him as interpretation of things larger
|
||
than itself, of the course of individual lives and the great tides of
|
||
society.
|
||
Miro’s later cultural life is not without interest. When he had
|
||
finished college and his architectural course, and was making headway
|
||
in his profession, his philosophy of the intellectual life began to
|
||
straighten itself out. Rapid as his surrender of orthodoxy had been,
|
||
it had taken him some time to live down that early education. He found
|
||
now that he would have to live down his heresies also, and get some
|
||
coherent system of tastes that was his own and not the fruit of either
|
||
docility or the zeal of propaganda.
|
||
The old battles that were still going on helped Miro to realize his
|
||
modern position. It was a queer, musty quarrel, but it was enlisting
|
||
minds from all classes and of all intellectual fibers. The “classics”
|
||
were dying hard, as Miro recognized whenever he read, in the magazines,
|
||
attacks on the “new education.” He found that professors were still
|
||
taken seriously who declared in passion that without the universal
|
||
study of the Latin language in American schools all conceptions of
|
||
taste, standards, criticism, the historic sense itself, would vanish
|
||
from the earth. He found that even as late as 1917 professional men
|
||
were gathering together in solemn conclave and buttressing the “value
|
||
of the classics” with testimonials from “successful men” in a variety
|
||
of vocations. Miro was amused at the fact that the mighty studies once
|
||
pressed upon him so uncritically should now require, like the patent
|
||
medicines, testimonials as to their virtue. Bank presidents, lawyers,
|
||
and editors had taken the Latin language regularly for years, and had
|
||
found its effects painless and invigorating. He could not escape the
|
||
unconscious satire that such plump and prosperous Americans expressed
|
||
when they thought it admirable to save their cherished intellectual
|
||
traditions in any such fashion.
|
||
Other conservatives Miro saw to be abandoning the line of opposition
|
||
to science, only to fall back on the line of a defensive against
|
||
“pseudo-science,” as they seemed to call whatever intellectual
|
||
interests had not yet become indubitably reputable. It was a line which
|
||
would hold them rather strongly for a time, Miro thought, because so
|
||
many of the cultural revolutionists agreed with them in hating some of
|
||
these arrogant and mechanical psychologies and sociologies that reduced
|
||
life to figures or organisms. But Miro felt also how obstructive was
|
||
their fight. If the “classics” had done little for him except to hold
|
||
his mind in an uncomprehending prison, and fetter his spontaneous
|
||
taste, they seemed to have done little more for even the thorough
|
||
scholars. When professors had devoted scholarly lives to the “classics”
|
||
only to exhibit in their own polemics none of the urbanity and
|
||
intellectual command which were supposed by the believer somehow to
|
||
rub off automatically on the faithful student, Miro had to conclude an
|
||
absence of causal connection between the “classics” and the able modern
|
||
mind. When, moreover, critical power or creative literary work became
|
||
almost extinct among these defenders of the “old education,” Miro felt
|
||
sure that a revolution was needed in the materials and attitudes of
|
||
“culture.”
|
||
The case of the defenders was all the weaker because their enemies were
|
||
not wanton infidels, ignorant of the holy places they profaned. They
|
||
were rather cultural “Modernists,” reforming the church from within.
|
||
They had the classic background, these young vandals, but they had
|
||
escaped from its flat and unoriented surface. Abreast of the newer
|
||
objective, impersonal standards of thinking, they saw the weakness of
|
||
these archaic minds which could only appeal to vested interests in
|
||
culture and testimonials from successful men.
|
||
The older critics had long since disavowed the intention of
|
||
discriminating among current writers. These men, who had to have an
|
||
Academy to protect them, lumped the younger writers of verse and prose
|
||
together as “anarchic” and “naturalistic,” and had become, in these
|
||
latter days, merely peevish and querulous, protesting in favor of
|
||
standards that no longer represented our best values. Every one, in
|
||
Miro’s time, bemoaned the lack of critics, but the older critics seemed
|
||
to have lost all sense of hospitality and to have become tired and a
|
||
little spitefully disconsolate, while the newer ones were too intent on
|
||
their crusades against puritanism and philistinism to have time for a
|
||
constructive pointing of the way.
|
||
Miro had a very real sense of standing at the end of an era. He and his
|
||
friends had lived down both their old orthodoxies of the classics and
|
||
their new orthodoxies of propaganda. Gone were the priggishness and
|
||
self-consciousness which had marked their teachers. The new culture
|
||
would be more personal than the old, but it would not be held as a
|
||
personal property. It would be democratic in the sense that it would
|
||
represent each person’s honest spontaneous taste. The old attitude was
|
||
only speciously democratic. The assumption was that if you pressed
|
||
your material long enough and winningly enough upon your culturable
|
||
public, they would acquire it. But the material was something handed
|
||
down, not grown in the garden of their own appreciations. Under
|
||
these conditions the critic and appreciator became a mere impersonal
|
||
register of orthodox opinion. The cultivated person, in conforming his
|
||
judgments to what was authoritatively taught him, was really a member
|
||
of the herd--a cultivated herd, it is true, but still a herd. It was
|
||
the mass that spoke through the critic and not his own discrimination.
|
||
These authoritative judgments might, of course, have come--probably
|
||
had come--to the herd through discerning critics, but in Miro’s time
|
||
judgment in the schools had petrified. One believed not because one
|
||
felt the original discernment, but because one was impressed by the
|
||
weight and reputability of opinion. At least so it seemed to Miro.
|
||
Now just as the artists had become tired of conventions and were
|
||
breaking through into new and personal forms, so Miro saw the younger
|
||
critics breaking through these cultural conventions. To the elders
|
||
the result would seem mere anarchy. But Miro’s attitude did not want
|
||
to destroy, it merely wanted to rearrange the materials. He wanted no
|
||
more second-hand appreciations. No one’s cultural store was to include
|
||
anything that one could not be enthusiastic about. One’s acquaintance
|
||
with the best that had been said and thought should be encouraged--in
|
||
Miro’s ideal school--to follow the lines of one’s temperament. Miro,
|
||
having thrown out the old gods, found them slowly and properly coming
|
||
back to him. Some would always repel him, others he hoped to understand
|
||
eventually. But if it took wisdom to write the great books, did it not
|
||
also take wisdom to understand them? Even the Latin writers he hoped
|
||
to recover, with the aid of translations. But why bother with Greek
|
||
when you could get Euripides in the marvellous verse of Gilbert Murray?
|
||
Miro was willing to believe that no education was complete without at
|
||
least an inoculation of the virus of the two orthodoxies that he was
|
||
transcending.
|
||
As Miro looked around the American scene, he wondered where the
|
||
critics were to come from. He saw, on the one hand, Mr. Mencken and
|
||
Mr. Dreiser and their friends, going heavily forth to battle with
|
||
the Philistines, glorying in pachydermatous vulgarisms that hurt the
|
||
polite and cultivated young men of the old school. And he saw these
|
||
violent critics, in their rage against puritanism, becoming themselves
|
||
moralists, with the same bigotry and tastelessness as their enemies.
|
||
No, these would never do. On the other hand, he saw Mr. Stuart P.
|
||
Sherman, in his youthful if somewhat belated ardor, revolting so
|
||
conscientiously against the “naturalism” and crude expression of
|
||
current efforts that, in his defense of _belles-lettres_, of the
|
||
fine tradition of literary art, he himself became a moralist of the
|
||
intensest brand, and as critic plumped for Arnold Bennett, because that
|
||
clever man had a feeling for the proprieties of human conduct. No, Mr.
|
||
Sherman would do even less adequately. His fine sympathies were as
|
||
much out of the current as was the specious classicism of Professor
|
||
Shorey. He would have to look for the critics among the young men who
|
||
had an abounding sense of life, as well as a feeling for literary form.
|
||
They would be men who had not been content to live on their cultural
|
||
inheritance, but had gone out into the modern world and amassed a fresh
|
||
fortune of their own. They would be men who were not squeamish, who did
|
||
not feel the delicate differences between “animal” and “human” conduct,
|
||
who were enthusiastic about Mark Twain and Gorki as well as Romain
|
||
Rolland, and at the same time were thrilled by Copeau’s theater.
|
||
Where was a better program for culture, for any kind of literary
|
||
art? Culture as a living effort, a driving attempt both at sincere
|
||
expression and at the comprehension of sincere expression wherever it
|
||
was found! Appreciation to be as far removed from the “I know what
|
||
I like!” as from the textbook impeccability of taste! If each mind
|
||
sought its own along these lines, would not many find themselves
|
||
agreed? Miro insisted on liking Amy Lowell’s attempt to outline
|
||
the tendencies in American poetry in a form which made clear the
|
||
struggles of contemporary men and women with the tradition and
|
||
against “every affectation of the mind.” He began to see in the new
|
||
class-consciousness of poets the ending of that old division which
|
||
“culture” made between the chosen people and the gentiles. We were
|
||
now to form little pools of workers and appreciators of similar
|
||
temperaments and tastes. The little magazines that were starting up
|
||
became voices for these new communities of sentiment. Miro thought that
|
||
perhaps at first it was right to adopt a tentative superciliousness
|
||
towards the rest of the world, so that both Mr. Mencken with his
|
||
shudders at the vulgar Demos and Mr. Sherman with his obsession with
|
||
the sanely and wholesomely American might be shut out from influence.
|
||
Instead of fighting the Philistine in the name of freedom, or fighting
|
||
the vulgar iconoclast in the name of wholesome human notions, it might
|
||
be better to write for one’s own band of comprehenders, in order that
|
||
one might have something genuine with which to appeal to both the mob
|
||
of the “bourgeois” and the ferocious vandals who had been dividing
|
||
the field among them. Far better a quarrel among these intensely
|
||
self-conscious groups than the issues that had filled _The Atlantic_
|
||
and _The Nation_ with their dreary obsolescence. Far better for the
|
||
mind that aspired towards “culture” to be told not to conform or
|
||
worship, but to search out its group, its own temperamental community
|
||
of sentiment, and there deepen appreciations through sympathetic
|
||
contact.
|
||
It was no longer a question of being hospitable towards the work of
|
||
other countries. Miro found the whole world open to him, in these
|
||
days, through the enterprise of publishers. He and his friends felt
|
||
more sympathetic with certain groups in France and Russia than they
|
||
did with the variegated “prominent authors” of their own land. Winston
|
||
Churchill as a novelist came to seem more of an alien than Artzybashev.
|
||
The fact of culture being international had been followed by a sense of
|
||
its being. The old cultural attitude had been hospitable enough, but it
|
||
had imported its alien culture in the form of “comparative literature.”
|
||
It was hospitable only in trying to mould its own taste to the orthodox
|
||
canons abroad. The older American critic was mostly interested in
|
||
getting the proper rank and reverence for what he borrowed. The new
|
||
critic will take what suits his community of sentiment. He will want
|
||
to link up not with the foreign canon, but with that group which is
|
||
nearest in spirit with the effort he and his friends are making. The
|
||
American has to work to interpret and portray the life he knows. He
|
||
cannot be international in the sense that anything but the life in
|
||
which he is saturated, with its questions and its colors, can be the
|
||
material for his art. But he can be international--and must be--in the
|
||
sense that he works with a certain hopeful vision of a “young world,”
|
||
and with certain ideal values upon which the younger men, stained and
|
||
revolted by war, in all countries are agreeing.
|
||
Miro wonders sometimes whether the direction in which he is tending
|
||
will not bring him around the circle again to a new classicism. The
|
||
last stage in the history of the man of culture will be that “classic”
|
||
which he did not understand and which his mind spent its youth in
|
||
overthrowing. But it will be a classicism far different from that which
|
||
was so unintelligently handed down to him in the American world. It
|
||
will be something worked out and lived into. Looking into the future
|
||
he will have to do what Van Wyck Brooks calls “inventing a usable
|
||
past.” Finding little in the American tradition that is not tainted
|
||
with sweetness and light and burdened with the terrible patronage of
|
||
bourgeois society, the new classicist will yet rescue Thoreau and
|
||
Whitman and Mark Twain and try to tap through them a certain eternal
|
||
human tradition of abounding vitality and moral freedom, and so build
|
||
out the future. If the classic means power with restraint, vitality
|
||
with harmony, a fusion of intellect and feeling, and a keen sense of
|
||
the artistic conscience, then the revolutionary world is coming out
|
||
into the classic. When Miro sees behind the minds of _The Masses_ group
|
||
a desire for form and for expressive beauty, and sees the radicals
|
||
following Jacques Copeau and reading Chekhov, he smiles at the thought
|
||
of the American critics, young and old, who do not know yet that they
|
||
are dead.
|
||
It was Matthew Arnold, read and reverenced by the generation
|
||
immediately preceding our own, who set to our eyes a definition and a
|
||
goal of culture which has become the common property of all our world.
|
||
To know the best that had been thought and said, to appreciate the
|
||
master-works which the previous civilizations had produced, to put our
|
||
minds and appreciations in contact with the great of all ages,--here
|
||
was a clear ideal which dissolved the mists in which the vaguenesses of
|
||
culture had been lost. And it was an ideal that appealed with peculiar
|
||
force to Americans. For it was a democratic ideal; every one who had
|
||
the energy and perseverance could reasonably expect to acquire by
|
||
taking thought that orientation of soul to which Arnold gave the magic
|
||
name of culture. And it was a quantitative ideal; culture was a matter
|
||
of acquisition--with appreciation and prayerfulness perhaps, but still
|
||
a matter of adding little by little to one’s store until one should
|
||
have a vision of that radiant limit, when one knew all the best that
|
||
had been thought and said and pictured in the world.
|
||
I do not know in just what way the British public responded to Arnold’s
|
||
eloquence; if the prophetic wrath of Ruskin failed to stir them, it is
|
||
not probable that they were moved by the persuasiveness of Arnold. But
|
||
I do know that, coming at a time when America was producing rapidly an
|
||
enormous number of people who were “comfortably off,” as the phrase
|
||
goes, and who were sufficiently awake to feel their limitations, with
|
||
the broader horizons of Europe just opening on the view, the new
|
||
doctrine had the most decisive effect on our succeeding spiritual
|
||
history. The “land-of-liberty” American of the era of Dickens still
|
||
exists in the British weeklies and in observations of America by callow
|
||
young journalists, but as a living species he has long been extinct.
|
||
His place has been taken by a person whose pride is measured not by
|
||
the greatness of the “land of the free,” but by his own orientation in
|
||
Europe.
|
||
Already in the nineties, our college professors and our artists were
|
||
beginning to require the seal of a European training to justify
|
||
their existence. We appropriated the German system of education.
|
||
Our millionaires began the collecting of pictures and the endowment
|
||
of museums with foreign works of art. We began the exportation of
|
||
school-teachers for a summer tour of Europe. American art and music
|
||
colonies sprang up in Paris and Berlin and Munich. The movement became
|
||
a rush. That mystical premonition of Europe, which Henry James tells
|
||
us he had from his earliest boyhood, became the common property of the
|
||
talented young American, who felt a certain starvation in his own land,
|
||
and longed for the fleshpots of European culture. But the bourgeoisie
|
||
soon followed the artistic and the semi-artistic, and Europe became so
|
||
much the fashion that it is now almost a test of respectability to have
|
||
traveled at least once abroad.
|
||
Underlying all this vivacious emigration, there was of course a real
|
||
if vague thirst for “culture,” and, in strict accord with Arnold’s
|
||
definition, the idea that somehow culture could be imbibed, that from
|
||
the contact with the treasures of Europe there would be rubbed off
|
||
on us a little of that grace which had made the art. So for those
|
||
who could not travel abroad, our millionaires transported, in almost
|
||
terrifying bulk and at staggering cost, samples of everything that the
|
||
foreign galleries had to show. We were to acquire culture at any cost,
|
||
and we had no doubt that we had discovered the royal road to it. We
|
||
followed it, at any rate, with eye single to the goal. The naturally
|
||
sensitive, who really found in the European literature and arts some
|
||
sort of spiritual nourishment, set the pace, and the crowd followed at
|
||
their heels.
|
||
This cultural humility of ours astonished and still astonishes Europe.
|
||
In England, where “culture” is taken very frivolously, the bated
|
||
breath of the American, when he speaks of Shakespeare or Tennyson or
|
||
Browning, is always cause for amusement. And the Frenchman is always a
|
||
little puzzled at the crowds who attend lectures in Paris on “How to
|
||
See Europe Intelligently,” or are taken in vast parties through the
|
||
Louvre. The European objects a little to being so constantly regarded
|
||
as the keeper of a huge museum. If you speak to him of culture, you
|
||
find him frankly more interested in contemporaneous literature and art
|
||
and music than in his worthies of the olden time, more interested
|
||
in discriminating the good of to-day than in accepting the classics.
|
||
If he is a cultivated person, he is much more interested usually in
|
||
quarreling about a living dog than in reverencing a dead lion. If he
|
||
is a French _lettré_, for instance, he will be producing a book on
|
||
the psychology of some living writer, while the Anglo-Saxon will be
|
||
writing another on Shakespeare. His whole attitude towards the things
|
||
of culture, be it noted, is one of daily appreciation and intimacy, not
|
||
that attitude of reverence with which we Americans approach alien art,
|
||
and which penalizes cultural heresy among us.
|
||
The European may be enthusiastic, polemic, radiant, concerning his
|
||
culture; he is never humble. And he is, above all, never humble before
|
||
the culture of another country. The Frenchman will hear nothing but
|
||
French music, read nothing but French literature, and prefers his own
|
||
art to that of any other nation. He can hardly understand our almost
|
||
pathetic eagerness to learn of the culture of other nations, our
|
||
humility of worship in the presence of art that in no sense represents
|
||
the expression of any of our ideals and motivating forces.
|
||
To a genuinely patriotic American this cultural humility of ours is
|
||
somewhat humiliating. In response to this eager inexhaustible interest
|
||
in Europe, where is Europe’s interest in us? Europe is to us the land
|
||
of history, of mellow tradition, of the arts and graces of life, of the
|
||
best that has been said and thought in the world. To Europe we are the
|
||
land of crude racial chaos, of skyscrapers and bluff, of millionaires
|
||
and “bosses.” A French philosopher visits us, and we are all eagerness
|
||
to get from him an orientation in all that is moving in the world of
|
||
thought across the seas. But does he ask about our philosophy, does
|
||
he seek an orientation in the American thought of the day? Not at
|
||
all. Our humility has kept us from forcing it upon his attention, and
|
||
it scarcely exists for him. Our advertising genius, so powerful and
|
||
universal where soap and biscuits are concerned, wilts and languishes
|
||
before the task of trumpeting our intellectual and spiritual products
|
||
before the world. Yet there can be little doubt which is the more
|
||
intrinsically worth advertising. But our humility causes us to be taken
|
||
at our own face value, and for all this patient fixity of gaze upon
|
||
Europe, we get little reward except to be ignored, or to have our
|
||
interest somewhat contemptuously dismissed as parasitic.
|
||
And with justice! For our very goal and ideal of culture has made us
|
||
parasites. Our method has been exactly wrong. For the truth is that the
|
||
definition of culture, which we have accepted with such devastating
|
||
enthusiasm, is a definition emanating from that very barbarism from
|
||
which its author recoiled in such horror. If it were not that all our
|
||
attitude showed that we had adopted a quite different standard, it
|
||
would be the merest platitude to say that culture is not an acquired
|
||
familiarity with things outside, but an inner and constantly operating
|
||
taste, a fresh and responsive power of discrimination, and the
|
||
insistent judging of everything that comes to our minds and senses. It
|
||
is clear that such a sensitive taste cannot be acquired by torturing
|
||
our appreciations into conformity with the judgments of others, no
|
||
matter how “authoritative” those judgments may be. Such a method means
|
||
a hypnotization of judgment, not a true development of soul.
|
||
At the back of Arnold’s definition is, of course, the implication
|
||
that if we have only learned to appreciate the “best,” we shall have
|
||
been trained thus to discriminate generally, that our appreciation of
|
||
Shakespeare will somehow spill over into admiration of the incomparable
|
||
art of Mr. G. Lowes Dickinson. This is, of course, exactly to reverse
|
||
the psychological process. A true appreciation of the remote and
|
||
the magnificent is acquired only after the judgment has learned to
|
||
discriminate with accuracy and taste between the good and bad, the
|
||
sincere and the false, of the familiar and contemporaneous art and
|
||
writing of every day. To set up an alien standard of the classics is
|
||
merely to give our lazy taste a resting-point, and to prevent forever
|
||
any genuine culture.
|
||
This virus of the “best” rages throughout all our Anglo-Saxon campaign
|
||
for culture. Is it not a notorious fact that our professors of English
|
||
literature make no attempt to judge the work produced since the death
|
||
of the last consecrated saint of the literary canon,--Robert Louis
|
||
Stevenson? In strict accordance with Arnold’s doctrine, they are
|
||
waiting for the judgment upon our contemporaries which they call the
|
||
test of time, that is, an authoritative objective judgment, upon which
|
||
they can unquestioningly rely. Surely it seems as if the principle of
|
||
authority, having been ousted from religion and politics, had found
|
||
a strong refuge in the sphere of culture. This tyranny of the “best”
|
||
objectifies all our taste. It is a “best” that is always outside of
|
||
our native reactions to the freshnesses and sincerities of life, a
|
||
“best” to which our spontaneities must be disciplined. By fixing our
|
||
eyes humbly on the ages that are past, and on foreign countries, we
|
||
effectually protect ourselves from that inner taste which is the only
|
||
sincere “culture.”
|
||
Our cultural humility before the civilizations of Europe, then, is the
|
||
chief obstacle which prevents us from producing any true indigenous
|
||
culture of our own. I am far from saying, of course, that it is not
|
||
necessary for our arts to be fertilized by the civilizations of other
|
||
nations past and present. The culture of Europe has arisen only from
|
||
such an extensive cross-fertilization in the past. But we have passed
|
||
through that period of learning, and it is time for us now to set up
|
||
our individual standards. We are already “heir of all the ages” through
|
||
our English ancestry, and our last half-century of European idolatry
|
||
has done for us all that can be expected. But, with our eyes fixed
|
||
on Europe, we continue to strangle whatever native genius springs
|
||
up. Is it not a tragedy that the American artist feels the imperative
|
||
need of foreign approval before he can be assured of his attainment?
|
||
Through our inability or unwillingness to judge him, through our
|
||
cultural humility, through our insistence on the objective standard,
|
||
we drive him to depend on a foreign clientèle, to live even in foreign
|
||
countries, where taste is more confident of itself and does not require
|
||
the label, to be assured of the worth of what it appreciates.
|
||
The only remedy for this deplorable situation is the cultivation of
|
||
a new American nationalism. We need that keen introspection into the
|
||
beauties and vitalities and sincerities of our own life and ideals that
|
||
characterizes the French. The French culture is animated by principles
|
||
and tastes which are as old as art itself. There are “classics,”
|
||
not in the English and Arnoldian sense of a consecrated canon,
|
||
dissent from which is heresy, but in the sense that each successive
|
||
generation, putting them to the test, finds them redolent of those
|
||
qualities which are characteristically French, and so preserves them
|
||
as a precious heritage. This cultural chauvinism is the most harmless
|
||
of patriotisms; indeed it is absolutely necessary for a true life of
|
||
civilization. And it can hardly be too intense, or too exaggerated.
|
||
Such an international art exhibition as was held recently in New York,
|
||
with the frankly avowed purpose of showing American artists how bad
|
||
they were in comparison with the modern French, represents an appalling
|
||
degradation of attitude which would be quite impossible in any other
|
||
country. Such groveling humility can only have the effect of making us
|
||
feeble imitators, instead of making us assert, with all the power at
|
||
our command, the genius and individuality which we already possess in
|
||
quantity, if we would only see it.
|
||
In the contemporary talent that Europe is exhibiting, or even in the
|
||
genius of the last half-century, one will go far to find greater poets
|
||
than our Walt Whitman, philosophers than William James, essayists
|
||
than Emerson and Thoreau, composers than MacDowell, sculptors than
|
||
Saint-Gaudens. In any other country such names would be focuses to
|
||
which interest and enthusiasms would converge, symbols of a national
|
||
spirit about which judgments and tastes would revolve. For none of
|
||
them could have been born in another country than our own. If some of
|
||
them had their training abroad, it was still the indigenous America
|
||
that their works expressed,--the American ideals and qualities, our
|
||
pulsating democracy, the vigor and daring of our pioneer spirit, our
|
||
sense of _camaraderie_, our dynamism, the big-heartedness of our
|
||
scenery, our hospitality to all the world. In the music of MacDowell,
|
||
the poetry of Whitman, the philosophy of James, I recognize a national
|
||
spirit, “l’esprit américain,” as superbly clear and gripping as
|
||
anything the culture of Europe has to offer us, and immensely more
|
||
stimulating, because of the very body and soul of to-day’s interests
|
||
and aspirations.
|
||
To come to an intense self-consciousness of these qualities, to
|
||
feel them in the work of these masters, and to search for them
|
||
everywhere among the lesser artists and thinkers who are trying to
|
||
express the soul of this hot chaos of America,--this will be the
|
||
attainment of culture for us. Not to look on ravished while our
|
||
marvelous millionaires fill our museums with “old masters,” armor, and
|
||
porcelains, but to turn our eyes upon our own art for a time, shut
|
||
ourselves in with our own genius, and cultivate with an intense and
|
||
partial pride what we have already achieved against the obstacles of
|
||
our cultural humility. Only thus shall we conserve the American spirit
|
||
and saturate the next generation with those qualities which are our
|
||
strength. Only thus can we take our rightful place among the cultures
|
||
of the world, to which we are entitled if we would but recognize it. We
|
||
shall never be able to perpetuate our ideals except in the form of art
|
||
and literature; the world will never understand our spirit except in
|
||
terms of art. When shall we learn that “culture,” like the kingdom of
|
||
heaven, lies within us, in the heart of our national soul, and not in
|
||
foreign galleries and books? When shall we learn to be proud? For only
|
||
pride is creative.
|
||
Karen interested more by what she always seemed about to say and be
|
||
than by anything she was at the moment. I could never tell whether her
|
||
inscrutability was deliberate or whether she did not know how to be
|
||
articulate. When she was pleased she would gaze at you benignly but
|
||
there was always a slight uneasiness in the air as if the serenity
|
||
were only a resultant of tumultuous feelings that were struggling
|
||
to appreciate the situation. She was always most animated when she
|
||
was annoyed at you. At those times you could fairly feel the piquant
|
||
shafts of evil-heartedness hitting your body as she contended against
|
||
your egoism or any of the personal failings that hurt her sense of
|
||
your fitness. These moments took you into the presence of the somber
|
||
irascibility of that northern land from which she came, and you felt
|
||
her foreignness brush you. Her smooth, fair, parted hair would become
|
||
bristly and surly; that face, which looked in repose like some Madonna
|
||
which a Swedish painter would love, took on a flush; green lights
|
||
glanced from her eyes. She was as inscrutable in anger as she was in
|
||
her friendliness. You never knew just what strange personal freak of
|
||
your villainy had set it off, though you often found it ascribed to
|
||
some boiling fury in your own placid soul. You were not aware of this
|
||
fury, but her intuition for it made her more inscrutable than ever.
|
||
I first met Karen at a state university in the West where she had come
|
||
for some special work in literature, after a few years of earning her
|
||
living at browbeaten stenography. She never went to her classes, and
|
||
I had many long walks with her by the lake. In that somewhat thin
|
||
intellectual atmosphere of the college, she devoted most of her time to
|
||
the fine art of personal relations, and, as nobody who ever looked at
|
||
her was not fascinated by her blonde inscrutability and curious soft
|
||
intensity, she had no difficulty in soon enmeshing herself in several
|
||
nebulous friendships. She told us that she hoped eventually to write
|
||
novels, but there was never anything to show that her novels unfolded
|
||
anywhere but in her mind as they interpreted the richly exciting
|
||
detail of her daily personal contacts. If you asked her about her
|
||
writings, you became immediately thankful that looks could not slay,
|
||
and some witch-fearing ancestor crossed himself shudderingly in your
|
||
soul. Intercourse with Karen was not very concrete. Our innumerable
|
||
false starts at understanding, the violence and exact quality of my
|
||
interest, the technique of getting just that smooth and silky rapport
|
||
between us which she was always anticipating--this seemed to make
|
||
up the fabric of her thoughts. At that time she was reading mostly
|
||
George Moore and Henry James, and I think she hoped we would all prove
|
||
adequate for a subtly interwoven society. This was a little difficult
|
||
in a group that was proud of its modernities, of its dizzy walking
|
||
over flimsy generalizations, of its gifts of exploding in shrapnels of
|
||
epigram. Karen loathed ideas and often quoted George Moore on their
|
||
hideousness. The mere suggestion of an idea was so likely to destroy
|
||
the poise of her mood, that conversation became a strategy worth
|
||
working for. Karen did not think, she felt--in slow, sensuous outlines.
|
||
You could feel her feelings curiously putting out long streamers at
|
||
you, and, if you were in the mood, a certain subterranean conversation
|
||
was not impossible. But if you did not happen to guess her mood, then
|
||
you quarreled.
|
||
When I met Karen, she was twenty-five, and I guessed that she would
|
||
always be twenty-five. She had personal ideals that she wished for
|
||
herself, and if you asked what she was thinking about, it was quite
|
||
likely to be the kind of noble woman she was to be, or feared she would
|
||
not be, at forty. But she was too insistent upon creating her world
|
||
in her own image to remain sensitive to the impressions that make
|
||
for growth. As the story of her life came out, the bitter immigrant
|
||
journey, the despised house-work, the struggle to get an education,
|
||
the office drudgery, the lack of roots and a place, you came to
|
||
appreciate this personal cult of Karen’s. She was so clearly finer
|
||
and intenser than the people who had been in the world about her,
|
||
that her starved soul had to find nourishment where it could. Even
|
||
if she was insensible to ideas, her soft searching at least allured.
|
||
It was perhaps her starved condition which made her friendships so
|
||
subject to sudden disaster. Karen’s notes were always a little more
|
||
brightly intimate than her personal resources were able to support.
|
||
She seemed to start with a plan of the conversation in her head. If
|
||
you bungled, and with her little retreats and evasions you were always
|
||
bungling, you could feel her spirit stamp its feet in vexation. She
|
||
would plan pleasant soliloquies, and you would find yourself in a
|
||
fiercely cross-examinatory mood. She loathed your probing of her mood,
|
||
and parried you in a helpless way which made you feel as if you were
|
||
tearing tissue. You always seemed with Karen to be in a laboratory of
|
||
personal relations where priceless things were being discovered, but
|
||
you felt her more as an alchemist than a modern physicist of the soul,
|
||
and her method rather that of trial and error than real experiment.
|
||
I am quite sure that Karen’s system of personal relations was platonic.
|
||
She never seemed to get beyond that laying of the broad foundation of
|
||
the Jamesian tone that would have been necessary to make the thing an
|
||
“affair.” She was often lovely and she was not unloved. She was much
|
||
interested in men, but it was more as co-actors in a personal drama
|
||
of her own devising than as lovers or even as men. The most she ever
|
||
hoped for, I think, was to be the sacred fount, and to have her flow
|
||
copious and manifold. You felt the immense qualifications a man would
|
||
have to have in the subtleties of rapport to make him even a candidate
|
||
for loving. For Karen, men seemed to exist only as they brought a touch
|
||
of ceremonial into their personal relations. I think Karen never quite
|
||
intended to surround herself with the impenetrable armor of vestal
|
||
virginity, and yet she did not avoid it. However glowing and mysterious
|
||
she might look as she lay before the fire in her room, so that to an
|
||
impatient friend nothing might seem more important than to catch her
|
||
up warmly in his arms, he would have been an audacious brigand who
|
||
violated the atmosphere. Karen always so much gave the impression of
|
||
playing for higher and nobler stakes that no brigand ever appeared.
|
||
Whether she deluded herself as to what she wanted or whether she had
|
||
a clearer insight than most women into the predatoriness of my sex,
|
||
her relations with men were rarely smooth. Caddishness seemed to be
|
||
breaking out repeatedly in the most unexpected places.
|
||
Some of the most serious of my friends got dark inadequacies charged
|
||
against them by Karen. I was a little in her confidence, but I could
|
||
rarely gather more than that the men of to-day had no sensitiveness
|
||
and were far too coarse for the fine and decent friendships which she
|
||
spent so much of her time and artistic imagination on arranging for
|
||
them with herself. I was constantly undergoing, at the hands of Karen,
|
||
a course of discipline myself, for my ungovernable temper or my various
|
||
repellant “tones” or my failure to catch just the quality of certain
|
||
people we discussed. I understood dimly the lucklessness of her “cads.”
|
||
They had perhaps not been urbanely plastic, they had perhaps been
|
||
impatiently adoring. They had at least not offended in any of the usual
|
||
ways. She would even forgive them sometimes with surprising suddenness.
|
||
But she never so far forgot her principles as to let them dictate a
|
||
mood. She never recognized any of the naïve collisions of men and women.
|
||
Karen often seemed keenly to wonder at this unsatisfactoriness of men.
|
||
She cultivated them, walking always in her magic circle, but they
|
||
slipped and grew dimmer. She had her fling of feminism towards the end
|
||
of her year. She left the university to become secretary for a state
|
||
suffrage leader. Under the stress of public life she became fierce and
|
||
serious. She abandoned the picturesque peasant costumes which she had
|
||
affected, and made herself hideous in mannish skirts and waists. She
|
||
felt the woes of women, and saw everywhere the devilish hand of the
|
||
exploiting male. If she ever married, she would have a house separate
|
||
from her husband. She would be no parasite, no man’s woman. She spoke
|
||
of the “human sex,” and set up its norms for her acquaintanceships.
|
||
When I saw Karen later, however, she was herself again. She had taken
|
||
up again the tissue of personal relations. But in that reconstituted
|
||
world all her friends seemed to be women. Her taste of battle had
|
||
seemed to fortify and enlighten that ancient shrinking; her old
|
||
annoyance that men should be abruptly different from what she would
|
||
have them. She was intimate with feminists whose feminism had done
|
||
little more for their emotional life than to make them acutely
|
||
conscious of the cloven hoof of the male. Karen, in her brooding way,
|
||
was able to give this philosophy a far more poetical glamor than any
|
||
one I knew. Her woman friends adored her, even those who had not
|
||
acquired that mystic sense of “loyalty to woman” and did not believe
|
||
that no man was so worthy that he might not be betrayed with impunity.
|
||
Karen, on her part, adored her friends, and the care that had been
|
||
spent on unworthy men now went into toning up and making subtle the
|
||
women around her. She did a great deal for them, and was constantly
|
||
discovering godlike creatures in shop and street and bringing them in
|
||
to be mystically mingled with her circle.
|
||
Naturally it is Karen’s married friends who cause her greatest concern.
|
||
Eternal vigilance is the price of their salvation from masculine
|
||
tyranny. In the enemy’s country, under at least the nominal yoke, these
|
||
married girls seem to Karen subjects for her prayer and aid. She has
|
||
become exquisitely sensitive to any aggressive gestures on the part of
|
||
these creatures with whom her dear friends have so inexplicably allied
|
||
themselves, and she is constantly in little subtle intrigues to get the
|
||
victim free or at least armisticed. She broods over her little circle,
|
||
inscrutable, vigilant, a true vestal virgin on the sacred hearth of
|
||
woman. Husbands are doubtless better for that silent enemy whom they
|
||
see jealously adoring their wives.
|
||
Karen still leaves trails of mystery and desire where she goes, but
|
||
it is as a woman’s woman that I see her now, and, I am ashamed to
|
||
say, ignore her. Men could not be crowded into her Jamesian world and
|
||
she has solved the problem by obliterating them. She will not live by
|
||
means of them. Since she does not know how to live with them she lives
|
||
without them.
|
||
I should scarcely have understood Sophronisba unless I had imagined
|
||
her against the background of that impeccable New England town from
|
||
which she says she escaped. It is a setting of elm-shaded streets, with
|
||
houses that can fairly be called mansions, and broad lawns stretching
|
||
away from the green and beautiful white church. In this large
|
||
princeliness of aspect the naïve stranger, like myself, would imagine
|
||
nothing but what was grave and sweet and frank. Yet behind those
|
||
pillared porticos Sophronisba tells me sit little and petrified people.
|
||
This spacious beauty exists for people who are mostly afraid; afraid
|
||
of each other, afraid of candor, afraid of sex, afraid of radicals.
|
||
Underneath the large-hearted exterior she says they are stifled within.
|
||
Women go queer from repression, spinsters multiply on families’ hands,
|
||
while the young men drift away to Boston. Dark tales are heard of
|
||
sexual insanity, and Sophronisba seems to think that the chastest wife
|
||
never conceives without a secret haunting in her heart of guilt. I
|
||
think there are other things in Sophronisba’s town, but these are the
|
||
things she has seen, and these are the things she has fled from.
|
||
Sophronisba is perhaps forty, but she is probably much younger than
|
||
she was at eleven. At that age the devilish conviction that she hated
|
||
her mother strove incessantly with the heavenly conviction that it was
|
||
her duty to love her. And there were unpleasing aunts and cousins who
|
||
exhaustingly had to be loved when she wished only spitefully to slap
|
||
them. Her conscience thus played her unhappy tricks through a submerged
|
||
childhood, until college came as an emancipation from that deadly
|
||
homesickness that is sickness not for your home but intolerance at it.
|
||
No more blessed relief comes to the conscience-burdened than the
|
||
chance to exchange their duties for their tastes, when what you should
|
||
unselfishly do to others is transformed into what books and pictures
|
||
you ought to like. Your conscience gets its daily exercise, but without
|
||
the moral pain. I imagine Sophronisba was not unhappy at college,
|
||
where she could give up her weary efforts to get her emotions correct
|
||
towards everybody in the world and the Three Persons in the heaven
|
||
above it, in favor of acquiring a sound and authorized cultural taste.
|
||
She seems to have very dutifully taken her master’s degree in English
|
||
literature, and for her industrious conscience is recorded somewhere
|
||
an unreadable but scholarly thesis, the very name of which she has
|
||
probably forgotten herself.
|
||
For several years Sophronisba must have flowed along on that thin
|
||
stream of the intellectual life which seems almost to have been
|
||
invented for slender and thin-lipped New England maidens who
|
||
desperately must make a living for themselves in order to keep out of
|
||
the dull prison of their homes. There was for Sophronisba a little
|
||
teaching, a little settlement work, a little writing, and a position
|
||
with a publishing house. And always the firm clutch on New York and the
|
||
dizzy living on a crust that might at any moment break and precipitate
|
||
her on the intolerable ease of her dutifully loving family. It is
|
||
the conventional opinion that this being a prisoner on parole can
|
||
be terminated only by the safe custody of a man, or the thrilling
|
||
freedom of complete personal success. Sophronisba’s career has been an
|
||
indeterminate sentence of womanhood. She is at once a proof of how very
|
||
hard the world still is on women, and how gaily they may play the game
|
||
with the odds against them.
|
||
I did not meet Sophronisba until she was in the mellow of her years,
|
||
and I cannot disentangle all her journalistic attempts, her dives
|
||
into this magazine and that, the electrifying discovery of her by
|
||
a great editor, the great careers that were always beginning, the
|
||
great articles that were called off at the last moment, the delayed
|
||
checks, the checks that never came, the magazines that went down
|
||
with all on board. But there were always articles that did come off,
|
||
and Sophronisba zigzagged her literary way through fat years of
|
||
weekly series and Sunday supplements and lean years of desk work and
|
||
book-reviewing. There are some of Sophronisba’s articles that I should
|
||
like to have written myself. She piles her facts with great neatness,
|
||
and there is a little ironic punch sometimes which is not enough to
|
||
disturb the simple people who read it, but flatters you as of the more
|
||
subtly discerning. Further, she has a genuine talent for the timely.
|
||
There has been strategy as well as art in her career. That feminine
|
||
Yankeeness which speaks out of her quizzical features has not lived in
|
||
vain. She tells with glee of editors captured in skilful sorties of
|
||
wit, of connections laboriously pieced together. She confesses to plots
|
||
to take the interesting and valuable in her net. There is continuous
|
||
action along her battlefront. She makes the acceptance of an article
|
||
an exciting event. As you drop in upon her for tea to follow her work
|
||
from week to week, you seem to move in a maze of editorial conspiracy.
|
||
Her zestfulness almost brings a thrill into the prosaic business of
|
||
writing. Not beguilements, but candor and wit, are her ammunition. One
|
||
would expect a person who looked like Sophronisba to be humorous. But
|
||
her wit is good enough to be surprising, it is sharp but it leaves no
|
||
sting. And it gets all the advantage of being carried along on a voice
|
||
that retains the least suggestion of a racy Eastern twang. With the
|
||
twang goes that lift and breathlessness that makes everything sound
|
||
interesting. When you come upon Sophronisba in that charming dinner
|
||
group that she frequents or as she trips out of the library, portfolio
|
||
in hand, with a certain sedate primness which no amount of New York
|
||
will ever strain out of her, you know that for a few moments the air is
|
||
going to be bright.
|
||
How Sophronisba got rid of the virus of her New England conscience
|
||
and morbidities I do not know. She must have exorcised more demons
|
||
than most of us are even acquainted with. Yet she never seems to have
|
||
lost the zest that comes from standing on the brink and watching the
|
||
Gadarene swine plunge heavily down into the sea. She has expelled the
|
||
terrors of religion and the perils of thwarted sex, but their nearness
|
||
still thrills. She would not be herself, neither would her wit be as
|
||
good, if it were not much made of gay little blasphemies and bold
|
||
feminist irreverences. There is the unconscious play to the stiff New
|
||
England gallery that makes what she says of more than local relevance.
|
||
In her serious talk there lingers the slight, interested bitter tang of
|
||
the old Puritan poison. But current issues mean much to Sophronisba.
|
||
These things which foolish people speak of with grave-faced strainings
|
||
after objectivity, with uncouth scientific jargon and sudden lapses
|
||
into pruriency, Sophronisba presents as a genuine revelation. Her
|
||
personal curiosity, combined with intellectual clarity, enable her
|
||
to get it all assimilated. Her allegiance went, of course, quickly
|
||
to Freud, and once, in a sudden summer flight to Jung in Zurich, she
|
||
sat many hours absorbing the theories from a grave, ample, formidably
|
||
abstract, and--for Sophronisba--too unhumorous Fraülein assistant. What
|
||
Sophronisba got she has made into a philosophy of life, translated
|
||
into New England dialect, and made quite revealingly her own. Before
|
||
journalism claimed her for more startling researches, she would often
|
||
give it for you in racy and eager fashion, turning up great layers of
|
||
her own life and of those she knew about her. Many demons were thus
|
||
sent flying.
|
||
Her exorcisms have been gained by a blazing candor and by a
|
||
self-directed sense of humor which alone can support it. With the
|
||
white light of this lantern she seems to have hunted down all the evil
|
||
shadows in that background of hers. Her relentless exposure of her
|
||
own motives, her eager publicity of soul and that fascinating life
|
||
which is hers, her gossip without malice and her wise cynicism, make
|
||
Sophronisba the greatest of reliefs from a world too full of decent
|
||
reticences and self-respects. That heavy conscience has been trained
|
||
down to an athletic trimness. I cannot find an interest or a realism or
|
||
a self-interpretation at which she will cringe, though three centuries
|
||
of Puritanism in her blood should tell her how unhallowed most of them
|
||
are.
|
||
Sophronisba, naturally, is feminist to the core. Particularly on the
|
||
subject of the economic servitude of married women does she grow very
|
||
tense, and if anywhere her sense of humor deserts her it is here. But
|
||
she is so convincing that she can throw me into a state of profound
|
||
depression, from which I am not cheered by reflecting how unconscious
|
||
of their servitude most of these women are. Sophronisba herself is a
|
||
symbol of triumphant spinsterhood rejoicing the heart, an unmarried
|
||
woman who knows she would make a wretched wife and does not seem to
|
||
mind. Her going home once a year to see her family has epic quality
|
||
about it. She parts from her friends with a kind of resigned daring,
|
||
and returns with the air of a Proserpine from the regions of Pluto.
|
||
To have laid all these ghosts of gloom and queerness and fear which
|
||
must have darkened her prim and neglected young life, is to have
|
||
made herself a rarely interesting woman. I think the most delightful
|
||
bohemians are those who have been New England Puritans first.
|
||
She was French from the crown of her head to the soles of her feet, but
|
||
she was of that France which few Americans, I think, know or imagine.
|
||
She belonged to that France which Jean-Christophe found in his friend
|
||
Olivier, a world of flashing ideas and enthusiasms, a golden youth of
|
||
ideals.
|
||
She had picked me out for an exchange of conversation, as the custom
|
||
is, precisely because I had left my name at the Sorbonne as a person
|
||
who wrote a little. I had put this bait out, as it were, deliberately,
|
||
with the intention of hooking a mind that cared for a little more than
|
||
mere chatter, but I had hardly expected to find it in the form of a
|
||
young girl who, as she told me in her charmingly polished note, was
|
||
nineteen and had just completed her studies.
|
||
These studies formed a useful introduction when she received me in
|
||
the little old-fashioned apartment in the Batignolles quarter on my
|
||
first visit. She had made them ever since she was five years old in
|
||
a wonderful old convent at Bourges; and in the town had lived her
|
||
grandmother, a very old lady, whom she had gone lovingly to see, as
|
||
often as she could be away from the watchful care of the nuns. In
|
||
her she had found her real mother, for her parents had been far away
|
||
in Brittany. When the old lady died, my friend had to face an empty
|
||
world, and to become acquainted all over again with a mother whom
|
||
she confessed she found “little sympathetic.” But she was a girl of
|
||
_devoir_, and she would do nothing to wound her.
|
||
She told me one afternoon as we took our first walk through the dusky
|
||
richness of the Musée Cluny, that the shock of death had disclosed
|
||
to her how fleeting life was, how much she thought of death, and
|
||
how much she feared it. I used the lustiness of her grandmother’s
|
||
eighty-four years to convince her as to how long she might have to
|
||
postpone her dread, but her fragile youth seemed already to feel the
|
||
beating wings about her. As she talked, her expression had all that
|
||
wistful seriousness of the French face which has not been devitalized
|
||
by the city, that sense of the nearness of unutterable things which
|
||
runs, a golden thread, through their poetry. Though she had lived away
|
||
from Brittany, in her graver moments there was much in her of the
|
||
patient melancholy of the Breton. For her father’s people had been
|
||
sea-folk,--not fishermen, but pilots and navigators on those misty and
|
||
niggardly shores,--and the long defeat and ever-trustful suffering was
|
||
in her blood. She would interpret to me the homely pictures at the
|
||
Luxembourg which spoke of coast and peasant life; and her beautiful
|
||
articulateness brought the very soul of France out of the canvases of
|
||
Cottet and Breton and Carrière. She understood these people.
|
||
But she was very various, and, if at first we plumbed together the
|
||
profoundest depths of her, we soon got into shallower waters. The
|
||
fluency of her thought outran any foreign medium, and made anything but
|
||
her flying French impossible. Her meager English had been learned from
|
||
some curious foreigner with an accent more German than French, and we
|
||
abandoned it by mutual consent. Our conversation became an exchange of
|
||
ideas and not of languages. Or rather her mind became the field where I
|
||
explored at will.
|
||
I think I began by assuming a Catholic devotion in her, and implied
|
||
that her serious outlook on life might lead her into the church. She
|
||
scoffed unmitigatedly at this. The nuns were not unkindly, she said,
|
||
but they were hard and narrow and did not care for the theater and for
|
||
books, which she adored.
|
||
She believed in God. “Et le théâtre!” I said, which delighted her
|
||
hugely. But these Christian virtues made unlovely characters and
|
||
cut one off so painfully from the fascinating moving world of ideas
|
||
outside. But surely after fourteen years of religious training and
|
||
Christian care, did she not believe in the Church, its priesthood and
|
||
its dogmas?
|
||
She repudiated her faith with indescribable vivacity. A hardened
|
||
Anglo-Saxon agnostic would have shown more diffidence in denying
|
||
his belief in dogma or the Bible. As for the latter, she said, it
|
||
might do for children of five years. And the cutting sweep of that
|
||
“enfants de cinq ans” afforded me a revealing glimpse of that lucid
|
||
intelligence with which the French mind cuts through layers and strata
|
||
of equivocation and compromise.
|
||
Most Frenchmen, if they lose their faith, go the swift and logical
|
||
road to atheism. Her loss was no childish dream or frenzy; she still
|
||
believed in God. But as for the Church and its priesthood,--she told
|
||
me, with malicious irony, and with the intelligence that erases
|
||
squeamishness, of a friend of hers who was the daughter of the priest
|
||
in charge of one of the largest Parisian churches. Would she confess
|
||
to a member of a priestly caste which thus broke faith? Confession was
|
||
odious anyway. She had been kept busy in school inventing sins. She
|
||
would go to church on Easter, but she would not take the Eucharist,
|
||
though I noticed a charming lapse when she crossed herself with holy
|
||
water as we entered Notre Dame one day.
|
||
Where had she ever got such ideas, shut up in a convent?--Oh, they were
|
||
all perfectly obvious, were they not? Where would one not get them?
|
||
This amazing soul of modern France!--which pervades even the walls of
|
||
convents with its spirit of free criticism and its terrible play of
|
||
the intelligence; which will examine and ruthlessly cast aside, just
|
||
as my vibrant, dark-haired, fragile friend was casting aside, without
|
||
hypocrisy or scruple, whatever ideas do not seem to enhance the clear
|
||
life to be lived.
|
||
Accustomed to grope and flounder in the mazes of the intellect, I found
|
||
her intelligence well-nigh terrifying. I would sit almost helplessly
|
||
and listen to her sparkle of talk. Her freedom knocked into pieces all
|
||
my little imagined world of French conventionalities and inhibitions.
|
||
How could this pale, dignified mother, to whom I was presented as she
|
||
passed hurriedly through the room one day, allow her to wander so
|
||
freely about Paris parks and museums with a foreign young man? Her
|
||
answer came superbly, with a flare of decision which showed me that
|
||
at least in one spot the eternal conflict of the generations had been
|
||
settled: “_Je me permets!_”--I allow myself. She gave me to understand
|
||
that for a while her mother had been difficult, but that there was no
|
||
longer any question of her “living her life”--_vivre sa vie_. And she
|
||
really thought that her mother, in releasing her from the useless
|
||
trammels, had become herself much more of an independent personality.
|
||
As for my friend, she dared, she took risks, she played with the
|
||
adventure of life. But she knew what was there.
|
||
The motherly Anglo-Saxon frame of mind would come upon me, to see
|
||
her in the light of a poor ignorant child, filled with fantastic
|
||
ideals, all so pitifully untested by experience. How ignorant she was
|
||
of life, and to what pitfalls her daring freedom must expose her in
|
||
this unregenerate France! I tried and gave it up. As she talked,--her
|
||
glowing eyes, in which ideas seemed to well up brimming with feeling
|
||
and purpose, saying almost more than her words,--she seemed too
|
||
palpably a symbol of luminous youth, a flaming militant of the younger
|
||
generation, who by her courage would shrivel up the dangers that so
|
||
beset the timorous. She was French, and that fact by itself meant
|
||
that whole layers of equivocation had been cut through, whole sets of
|
||
intricacies avoided.
|
||
In order to get the full shock of her individuality, I took her one
|
||
afternoon to a model little English tea-room on the rue de Rivoli,
|
||
where normal Britishers were reading _Punch_ and the _Spectator_
|
||
over their jam and cake. The little flurry of disapprobation and the
|
||
hostile stare which our appearance elicited from the well-bred families
|
||
and discreet young men at the tables, the flaring incongruity of her
|
||
dark, lithe, inscrutable personality in this bland, vacuous British
|
||
atmosphere, showed me as could nothing else how hard was the gem-like
|
||
flame with which she burned.
|
||
As we walked in the Luxembourg and along the quays, or sat on the
|
||
iron chairs in the gardens of the Parc Monceau or the Trocadéro, our
|
||
friendship became a sort of intellectual orgy. The difficulty of
|
||
following the pace of her flying tongue and of hammering and beating
|
||
my own thoughts into the unaccustomed French was fatiguing, but it was
|
||
the fascinating weariness of exploration. My first idle remarks about
|
||
God touched off a whole battery of modern ideas. None of the social
|
||
currents of the day seemed to have passed her by, though she had been
|
||
immured so long in her sleepy convent at Bourges. She had that same
|
||
interest and curiosity about other classes and conditions of life
|
||
which animates us here in America, and the same desire to do something
|
||
effective against the misery of poverty.
|
||
I had teased her a little about her academic, untried ideas, and
|
||
in grave reproof she told me, one afternoon, as we stood--of all
|
||
places!--on the porch of the Little Trianon at Versailles, a touching
|
||
story of a family of the poorest of the Parisian poor, whom she and
|
||
her mother visited and helped to get work. She did not think charity
|
||
accomplished very much, and flamed at the word “Socialism,” although
|
||
she had not yet had its program made very clear to her.
|
||
But mostly she was feminist,--an ardent disciple in that singularly
|
||
uncomplicated and happy march of the Frenchwomen, already so
|
||
practically emancipated, toward a definite social recognition of that
|
||
liberation. The normal Frenchwoman, in all but the richer classes,
|
||
is an economic asset to her country. And economic independence was
|
||
a cardinal dogma in my friend’s faith. She was already taking a
|
||
secretarial course, in order to ensure her ability to make her living;
|
||
and she looked forward quite eagerly to a career.
|
||
Marriage was in considerable disfavor; it had still the taint of the
|
||
Church upon it, while the civil marriage seemed, with the only recently
|
||
surrendered necessary parental consent, to mark the subjection of the
|
||
younger to the older generation. These barriers were now removed, but
|
||
the evil savor of the institution lingered on. My friend, like all the
|
||
French intellectuals, was all for the “union libre,” but it would have
|
||
to be loyal unto death. It was all the more inspiring as an ideal,
|
||
because it would be perhaps hard to obtain. Men, she was inclined to
|
||
think, were usually _malhonnête_, but she might find some day a man of
|
||
complete sympathy and complete loyalty. But she did not care. Life was
|
||
life, freedom was freedom, and the glory of being a woman in the modern
|
||
world was enough for her.
|
||
The French situation was perhaps quite as bad as it was pictured.
|
||
Friendship between a girl and a young man was almost impossible.
|
||
It was that they usually wished to love her. She did not mind them
|
||
on the streets. The students--oh, the students!--were frightfully
|
||
annoying; but perhaps one gave a _gifle_ and passed rapidly on. Her
|
||
parents, before she had become genuinely the captain of her soul, had
|
||
tried to marry her off in the orthodox French way. She had had four
|
||
proposals. Risking the clean candor of the French soul, I became
|
||
curious and audacious. So she dramatized for me, without a trace of
|
||
self-consciousness, a wonderful little scene of provincial manners.
|
||
The stiff young Frenchman making his stilted offer, her self-possessed
|
||
reluctance, her final refusal, were given in inimitable style. These
|
||
incidents, which in the life of a little American _bourgeoise_ would
|
||
have been crises or triumphs, and, at any rate, unutterably hoarded
|
||
secrets, were given with a cold frankness which showed refreshingly to
|
||
what insignificance marriage was relegated in her life. She wished, she
|
||
said, to _vivre sa vie_--to live her life. If marriage fitted in with
|
||
her living of her life, it might take her. It should never submerge
|
||
or deflect her. Countless Frenchwomen, in defiance of the strident
|
||
Anglo-Saxon belief, were able both to keep a household and to earn
|
||
their own living; and why not she also? She would always be free; and
|
||
her black eyes burned as they looked out so fearlessly into a world
|
||
that was to be all hers, because she expected nothing from it.
|
||
About this world, she had few illusions. To its worldlinesses and
|
||
glitter she showed really a superb indifference. I brutally tried to
|
||
trap her into a confession that she spurned it only because it might
|
||
be closed to her through lack of money or prestige. Her eloquent eyes
|
||
almost slew me with vivacious denial. She despised these “dolls” whose
|
||
only business in life was to wear clothes. Her own sober black was
|
||
not affectation, but only her way of showing that she was more than a
|
||
_poupée_. She did not say it, but I quite appreciated, and I knew well
|
||
that she knew, how charming a _poupée_ she might have made.
|
||
Several of her friends were gay and worldly. She spoke of them with
|
||
charming frankness, touching off, with a tone quite clean of malice,
|
||
all their little worthlessnesses and futilities. Some of this world,
|
||
indeed, shaded off into unimaginable _nuances_, but she was wholly
|
||
aware of its significance. In the inimitable French way, she disdained
|
||
to use its errors as a lever to elevate her own virtues.
|
||
Her blazing candor lighted up for me every part of her world. We
|
||
skirted abysses, but the language helped us wonderfully through. French
|
||
has worn tracks in so many fields of experience where English blunders
|
||
either boorishly or sentimentally. French is made for illumination and
|
||
clear expression; it has kept its purity and crispness and can express,
|
||
without shamefacedness or bungling, attitudes and interpretations which
|
||
the Anglo-Saxon fatuously hides.
|
||
My friend was dimly sensible of some such contrast. I think she had
|
||
as much difficulty in making me out as I had in making her out.
|
||
She was very curious as to how she compared with American girls.
|
||
She had once met one but had found her, though not a doll, yet not
|
||
_sympathique_ and little understandable. I had to tell my friend how
|
||
untranslatable she was. The Anglo-Saxon, I had to tell her, was apt to
|
||
be either a schoolchild or a middle-aged person. To the first, ideas
|
||
were strange and disturbing. To the second, they were a nuisance and
|
||
a bore. I almost assured her that in America she would be considered
|
||
a quite horrible portent. Her brimming idealism would make everybody
|
||
uncomfortable. The sensual delight which she took in thinking, the way
|
||
her ideas were all warmly felt and her feelings luminously expressed,
|
||
would adapt her badly to a world of school-children and tired business
|
||
men. I tried to go over for her the girls of her age whom I had
|
||
known. How charming they were to be sure, but, even when they had
|
||
ideas, how strangely inarticulate they sometimes were, and, if they
|
||
were articulate, how pedantic and priggish they seemed to the world
|
||
about them! And what forests of reticences and exaggerated values
|
||
there were, and curious illogicalities. How jealous they were of their
|
||
personalities, and what a suspicious and individualistic guard they
|
||
kept over their candor and sincerities! I was very gay and perhaps a
|
||
little cruel.
|
||
She listened eagerly, but I think she did not quite understand. If one
|
||
were not frankly a doll, was not life a great swirl to be grappled with
|
||
and clarified, and thought and felt about? And as for her personality,
|
||
the more she gave the more she had. She would take the high risks of
|
||
friendship.
|
||
To cross the seas and come upon my own enthusiasms and ideals vibrating
|
||
with so intense a glow seemed an amazing fortune. It was like coming
|
||
upon the same design, tinted in novel and picturesque colors of a
|
||
finer harmony. In this intellectual flirtation, carried on in _musée_
|
||
and garden and on quay throughout that cloudless April, I began to
|
||
suspect some gigantic flattery. Was her enthusiasm sincere, and her
|
||
clean-cutting ideas, or had she by some subtle intuition anticipated
|
||
me? Did she think, or was it to be expected of me, that I should fall
|
||
in love with her? But perhaps there was a touch of the too foreign
|
||
in her personality. And if I had fallen in love, I know it would not
|
||
have been with herself. It would have been with the Frenchness of her,
|
||
and perhaps was. It would have been with the eternal youth of France
|
||
that she was. For she could never have been so very glowing if France
|
||
had not been full of her. Her charm and appeal were far broader than
|
||
herself. It took in all that rare spiritual climate where one absorbs
|
||
ideas and ideals as the earth drinks in rain.
|
||
She was of that young France with its luminous understanding, its
|
||
personal verve, its light of expression, its way of feeling its ideas
|
||
and thinking its emotions, its deathless loyalty which betrays only at
|
||
the clutch of some deeper loyalty. She adored her country and all its
|
||
mystic values and aspirations. When she heard I was going to Germany,
|
||
she actually winced with pain. She could scarcely believe it. I fell
|
||
back at once to the position of a vulgar traveler, visiting even the
|
||
lands of the barbarians. They were her country’s enemies, and some day
|
||
they would attack. France awaited the onslaught fatalistically. She
|
||
did not want to be a man, but she wished that they would let women be
|
||
soldiers. If the war came, however, she would enlist at once as a Red
|
||
Cross nurse. She thrilled at the thought that perhaps there she could
|
||
serve to the uttermost.
|
||
And the war has come, hot upon her enthusiasms. She must have been long
|
||
since in the field, either at the army stations, or moving about among
|
||
the hospitals of Paris, her heart full of pride and pity for the France
|
||
which she loved and felt so well, and of whose deathless spirit she
|
||
was, for me, at least, so glowing a symbol.
|
||
My friend Fergus has all the characteristics of genius except the
|
||
divine fire. The guardian angel who presided at his birth and set in
|
||
order all his delicate appreciations just forgot to start flowing the
|
||
creative current. Fergus was born to suffer the pangs of artistic
|
||
desire without the gushing energy that would have moulded artistic
|
||
form. It was perhaps difficult enough to produce him as it was. There
|
||
is much that is clearly impossible about him. His father is a bluff
|
||
old Irish newspaper compositor, with the obstinately genial air of a
|
||
man who cannot believe that life will not some day do something for
|
||
him. His mother is a French-Canadian, jolly and stout, who plays old
|
||
Irish and French melodies on the harp, and mothers the young Catholic
|
||
girls of the crowded city neighborhood in which they live. She has the
|
||
slightly surprised background of never realized prosperity. Fergus
|
||
is an old child, and moves in the dark little flat, with its green
|
||
plush furniture, its prints of the Great Commoner and Lake Killarney,
|
||
its Bible texts of the Holy Name, with the detached condescension of
|
||
an exiled prince. He is very dark and finely formed, of the type that
|
||
would be taken for a Spaniard in France and an Italian in Spain, and
|
||
his manners have the distinction of the born aristocrat.
|
||
The influences of that close little Catholic society in which he was
|
||
brought up he has shed as a duck sheds water. His mother wished him to
|
||
be a Jesuit. The quickness of his mind, the refinement and hauteur of
|
||
his manner, intoxicated her with the assurance of his priestly future.
|
||
His father, however, inclined towards the insurance business. Fergus
|
||
himself viewed his future with cold disinterestedness. When I first met
|
||
him he had just emerged from a year of violin study at a music school.
|
||
The violin had been an escape from the twin horrors that had menaced
|
||
him. On his parents’ anxiety that he “make something of himself” he
|
||
looked with some disdain. He did, however, feel to a certain extent
|
||
their chagrin at finding so curious and aristocratic a person in
|
||
their family, and he allowed himself, with a fine stoicism as of an
|
||
exiled prince supporting himself until the revolution was crushed and
|
||
he was reinstated in his possessions, to be buried in an insurance
|
||
broker’s office. At this time he spent his evenings in the dim vaulted
|
||
reading-room of a public library composing music, or in wandering in
|
||
the park with his friends, discussing philosophy. His little music
|
||
notebook and Gomperz’s “Greek Thinkers” were rarely out of his hand.
|
||
Harmony and counterpoint had not appealed to him at the Conservatory,
|
||
but now the themes that raced and rocketed through his head compelled
|
||
him to composition. The bloodless scherzos and allegros which he
|
||
produced and tried to play for me on his rickety piano had so archaic a
|
||
flavor as to suggest that Fergus was inventing anew the art of music,
|
||
somewhat as our childhood is supposed to pass through all the stages
|
||
of the evolution of the race. As he did not seem to pass beyond a
|
||
pre-Bachian stage, he began to feel at length, he told me, that there
|
||
was something lacking in his style. But he was afraid that routine
|
||
study would dull his inspiration. It was time that he needed, and not
|
||
instruction. And time was slipping so quickly away. He was twenty-two,
|
||
and he could not grasp or control it.
|
||
When summer was near he came to me with an idea. His office work was
|
||
insupportable. Even accepting that one dropped eight of the best hours
|
||
of one’s every day into a black and bottomless pit in exchange for the
|
||
privilege of remaining alive, such a life was almost worse than none. I
|
||
had friends who were struggling with a large country farm. He wished to
|
||
offer them his services as farmhand on half-time in exchange for simple
|
||
board and lodging. Working in the morning, he would have all the rest
|
||
of his pastoral day for writing music.
|
||
Before I could communicate to him my friends’ reluctance to this
|
||
proposal, he told me that his musical inspiration had entirely left
|
||
him. He was now spending all his spare time in the Art Museum,
|
||
discovering tastes and delights that he had not known were in him.
|
||
Why had not some one told him of the joy of sitting and reading Plato
|
||
in those glowing rooms? The Museum was more significant when I walked
|
||
in it with Fergus. His gracious bearing almost seemed to please the
|
||
pictures themselves. He walked as a princely connoisseur through his
|
||
own historic galleries.
|
||
When I saw Fergus next, however, a physical depression had fallen upon
|
||
him. He had gone into a vegetarian diet and was enfeebling himself with
|
||
Spartan fare. He was disturbed by loneliness, the erotic world gnawed
|
||
persistently at him, and all the Muses seemed to have left him. But in
|
||
his gloominess, in the fine discrimination with which he analyzed his
|
||
helplessness, in the noble despair with which he faced an insoluble
|
||
world, he was more aristocratic than ever. He was not like one who had
|
||
never attained genius, fame, voluptuous passion, riches, he was rather
|
||
as one who had been bereft of all these things.
|
||
Returning last autumn from a year abroad, during which I had not heard
|
||
a word of Fergus, I found he had turned himself into a professional
|
||
violin-teacher. The insurance job had passed out, and for a few weeks
|
||
he had supported himself by playing the organ in a small Catholic
|
||
church. There was jugglery with his salary, however, and it annoyed him
|
||
to be so intimate a figure in a ritual to which he could only refer in
|
||
irony. Priests whose “will to power” background he analyzed to me with
|
||
Nietzschean fidelity always repelled him.
|
||
He was saved from falling back on the industrious parents who had so
|
||
strangely borne him by an offer to play the harmonium in the orchestra
|
||
of a fashionable restaurant. To this opportunity of making eighteen
|
||
dollars a week he had evidently gone with a new and pleasurable sense
|
||
of the power of wealth. It was easy, he said, but the heat and the
|
||
lights, the food and the long evening hours fairly nauseated him, and
|
||
he gave the work up.
|
||
All this time, I gathered, his parents had been restive over a certain
|
||
economic waste. They seemed to feel that his expensive musical
|
||
education should be capitalized more firmly and more profitably. His
|
||
mother had even deplored his lack of ambition. She had explored and
|
||
had discovered that one made much money as a “vaudeville act.” He had
|
||
obtained a trial at an Upper Bronx moving-picture vaudeville theater.
|
||
Fergus told me that the nervous girl who had gone on the stage before
|
||
him had been cut short in the middle of her “Fox-Trot Lullaby,” or
|
||
whatever her song was, by hostile yells from the audience. Fergus
|
||
himself went on in rather a depressed mood, and hardly did himself
|
||
justice. He played the Bach air, and a short movement from Brahms. He
|
||
did not, however, get that rapport with his audience which he felt the
|
||
successful vaudeville artist should feel. They had not yelled at him,
|
||
but they had refused to applaud, and the circuit manager had declined
|
||
to engage him.
|
||
After this experience it occurred to Fergus that he liked to teach,
|
||
and that his training had made him a professional musician. His
|
||
personality, he felt, was not unfavorable. By beginning modestly he
|
||
saw no reason why he should not build up a clientèle and an honorable
|
||
competence. When I saw him a week later at the Music Settlement, he
|
||
told me that there was no longer any doubt that he had found his
|
||
lifework. His fees are very small and his pupils are exacting. He has
|
||
practised much besides. He told me the other day that teaching was
|
||
uninspiring drudgery. He had decided to give it up, and compose songs.
|
||
Whenever I see Fergus I have a slight quickening of the sense of life.
|
||
His rich and rather somber personality makes all ordinary backgrounds
|
||
tawdry. He knows so exactly what he is doing and what he is feeling. I
|
||
do not think he reads very much, but he breathes in from the air around
|
||
him certain large aesthetic and philosophical ideas. There are many
|
||
philosophies and many artists, however, that he has never heard of, and
|
||
this ignorance of the concrete gives one a fine pleasure of impressing
|
||
him. One can pour into receptive ears judgments and enthusiasms that
|
||
have long ago been taken for granted by one’s more sophisticated
|
||
friends. His taste in art as in music is impeccable, and veers strongly
|
||
to the classics--Rembrandt and the Greeks, as Bach and Beethoven.
|
||
Fergus has been in love, but he does not talk much about it. A girl in
|
||
his words is somewhat dark and inscrutable. She always has something
|
||
haunting and finely-toned about her, whoever she may be. I always think
|
||
of the clothed lady in the flowing silks, in Titian’s “Sacred and
|
||
Profane Love.” Yet withal Fergus gives her a touch of the allurement of
|
||
her nude companion. His reserve, I think, always keeps these persons
|
||
very dusky and distant. His chastity is a result of his fineness
|
||
of taste rather than of feeble desire or conscious control. That
|
||
impersonal passion which descends on people like Fergus in a sultry
|
||
cloud he tells me he contrives to work off into his violin. I sometimes
|
||
wonder if a little more of it with a better violin would have made him
|
||
an artist.
|
||
But destiny has just clipped his wings so that he must live a life of
|
||
noble leisure instead of artistic creation. His unconscious interest
|
||
is the art of life. Against a background of Harlem flats and stodgy
|
||
bourgeois prejudices he works out this life of _otium cum dignitate_,
|
||
calm speculation and artistic appreciation that Nietzsche glorifies.
|
||
On any code that would judge him by the seven dollars a week which is
|
||
perhaps his average income he looks with cold disdain. He does not
|
||
demand that the world give him a living. He did not ask to come into
|
||
it, but being here he will take it with candor. Sometimes I think
|
||
he is very patient with life. Probably he is not happy. This is not
|
||
important. As his candor and his appreciations refresh me, I wonder
|
||
if the next best thing to producing works of art is not to be, like
|
||
Fergus, a work of art one’s self.
|
||
The Professor is a young man, but he had so obviously the misfortune
|
||
of growing up too early that he seems already like a mournful relic
|
||
of irrevocable days. His ardent youth was spent in that halcyon time
|
||
of the early nineteen-hundreds when all was innocence in the heart of
|
||
young America. “When I was in college,” the Professor often says, “all
|
||
this discussion of social questions was unknown to us. The growing
|
||
seriousness of the American college student is an inspiring phenomenon
|
||
in our contemporary life.”
|
||
In those days the young men who felt an urge within them went in for
|
||
literature. It was still the time when Presbyterian clergymen and
|
||
courtly Confederate generals were contributing the inspiration of
|
||
their ripe scholarship to the younger generation. It was the time
|
||
when Brander Matthews still thrilled the world of criticism with his
|
||
scintillating Gallic wit and his cosmopolitan wealth of friendships.
|
||
The young men of that time are still a race apart. Through these
|
||
literary masters they touched the intimate life of literature; they
|
||
knew Kipling and Stevenson, Arthur Symons and the great Frenchmen, and
|
||
felt themselves one with the charmed literary brotherhood throughout
|
||
the world. It was still the time when, free from philosophic or
|
||
sociologic taint, our American youth was privileged to breathe in from
|
||
men like Henry van Dyke and Charles Eliot Norton the ideals of the
|
||
scholar and the gentleman.
|
||
The Professor’s sensitive talent soon asserted itself. With Wordsworth
|
||
he had absorbed himself into the circumambient life of nature and
|
||
made the great reconciliation between her and man. With Shelley he
|
||
had dared unutterable things and beaten his wings against the stars.
|
||
With Tennyson he had shuddered pensively on the brink of declining
|
||
faith. With Carlyle he had felt the call of duty, and all the revulsion
|
||
against a sordid and mechanical age. With Arnold he had sought the
|
||
sweetness and light which should come to him from knowing all the best
|
||
that had been said and thought in the world. The Professor had scarcely
|
||
begun to write verse before he found himself victor in a prize poetry
|
||
contest which had enlisted the talent of all the best poets of America.
|
||
He often tells his students of the intoxication of that evening when
|
||
he encircled the dim vaulted corridors of the college library, while
|
||
his excited brain beat out the golden couplets of the now celebrated
|
||
“Ganymede.” The success of this undergraduate stripling fell like
|
||
a thunderbolt upon the literary world. Already consecrated to the
|
||
scholar’s career, he found fallen upon him the miracle of the creative
|
||
artist. But Shelley and Keats had had their greatness very early, too.
|
||
And when, at the early age of twenty-three, the Professor published
|
||
his masterly doctoral dissertation on “The Anonymous Lyrics of the
|
||
Fourteenth Century,” he at once attained in the world of literary
|
||
scholarship the distinction that “Ganymede” had given him in the world
|
||
of poetry.
|
||
His career has not frustrated those bright promises. His rare fusion
|
||
of scholarship and genius won him the chair of English Literature in
|
||
one of our most rapidly growing colleges, where he has incomparable
|
||
opportunities for influencing the ideals of the young men under him.
|
||
His courses are among the most popular in the college. Although
|
||
his special scholarly research has been devoted to pre-Elizabethan
|
||
literature, he is at home in all the ages. His lectures are models of
|
||
carefully weighed criticism. “My purpose,” he says, “is to give my
|
||
boys the spirit of the authors, and let them judge between them for
|
||
themselves.” Consequently, however much Swinburne may revolt him, the
|
||
Professor expounds the carnal and desperate message of that poet with
|
||
the same care which he gives to his beloved Wordsworth. “When they have
|
||
heard them all,” he told me once, “I can trust my boys to feel the
|
||
insufficiency of any purely materialistic interpretation of life.”
|
||
Impeccable as is his critical taste where the classics are concerned,
|
||
he is reluctant about giving his opinion to those students who come
|
||
for a clue through the current literary maze. Stevenson was early
|
||
canonized, and the Professor speaks with charm and fulness upon him,
|
||
but G. B. S. and Galsworthy must wait. “Time, perhaps,” says the
|
||
Professor, “will put the seal of approval upon them. Meanwhile our
|
||
judgment can be only tentative.” His fine objectivity is shown in those
|
||
lists of the hundred best books of the year which he is sometimes
|
||
asked to compile for the Sunday newspapers. Rarely does a new author,
|
||
never does a young author, appear among them. Scholarly criticism, the
|
||
Professor feels, can scarcely be too cautious.
|
||
The Professor’s inspiring influence upon his students, however, is not
|
||
confined to his courses. He has formed a little literary society in the
|
||
college, which meets weekly to discuss with him the larger cultural
|
||
issues of the time. Lately he has become interested in philosophy.
|
||
“In my day,” he once told me, “we young literary men did not study
|
||
philosophy.” But now, professor that he is, he goes to sit at the feet
|
||
of the great metaphysicians of his college. He has been immensely
|
||
stirred by the social and moral awakening of recent years. He willingly
|
||
allows discussions of socialism in his little society, but is inclined
|
||
to deprecate the fanaticism of college men who lose their sense of
|
||
proportion on social questions. But in his open-mindedness to radical
|
||
thought he is an inspiration to all who meet him. To be radical, he
|
||
tells his boys, is a necessary part of experience. In professorial
|
||
circles he is looked upon as a veritable revolutionist, for he
|
||
encourages the discussion of vital questions even in the classroom.
|
||
Questions such as evolution, capital punishment, free thought,
|
||
protection and education of women, furnish the themes for composition.
|
||
And from the essays of the masters--Macaulay, Huxley, John Stuart Mill
|
||
and Matthew Arnold--come the great arguments as freshly and as vitally
|
||
as of yore. Literature, says the Professor, is not merely language; it
|
||
is ideas. We must above all, he says, teach our undergraduates to think.
|
||
Although the Professor is thus responsive to the best radicalisms of
|
||
the day, he does not let their shock break the sacred chalice of the
|
||
past. He is deeply interested in the religious life of his college.
|
||
A devout Episcopalian, he deplores the callousness of the present
|
||
generation towards the immemorial beauty of ritual and dogma. The
|
||
empty seats of the college chapel fill him with dismay. One of his
|
||
most beautiful poems pictures his poignant sensations as he comes
|
||
from a quiet hour within its dim, organ-haunted shadows out into the
|
||
sunlight, where the careless athletes are running bare-leggedly past
|
||
him, unmindful of the eternal things.
|
||
I think I like the Professor best in his study at home, when he talks
|
||
on art and life with one or two respectful students. On the wall is
|
||
a framed autograph of Wordsworth, picked up in some London bookshop;
|
||
and a framed letter of appreciation from Richard Watson Gilder. On the
|
||
table stands a richly-bound volume of “Ganymede” with some of the very
|
||
manuscripts, as he has shown us, bound in among the leaves. His deep
|
||
and measured voice flows pleasantly on in anecdotes of the Authors’
|
||
Club, or reminiscences of the golden past. As one listens, the glamor
|
||
steals upon one. This is the literary life, grave, respected, serene.
|
||
All else is hectic rush, modern ideas a futile babel. It is men like
|
||
the Professor who keep the luster of scholarship bright, who hold true
|
||
the life of the scholar and the gentleman as it was lived of old. In a
|
||
world of change he keeps the faith pure.
|
||
When Dr. Alexander Mackintosh Butcher was elected to the presidency
|
||
of Pluribus University ten years ago, there was general agreement
|
||
that in selecting a man who was not only a distinguished educator but
|
||
an executive of marked business ability the trustees had done honor
|
||
to themselves and their university as well as to the new president.
|
||
For Dr. Butcher had that peculiar genius which would have made him as
|
||
successful in Wall Street or in a governor’s chair as in the classroom.
|
||
Every alumnus of Pluribus knows the story told of the young Alexander
|
||
Mackintosh Butcher, standing at the age of twenty-two at the threshold
|
||
of a career. Eager, energetic, with a brilliant scholastic record
|
||
behind him, it was difficult to decide into what profession he should
|
||
throw his powerful talents. To his beloved and aged president the young
|
||
man went for counsel. “My boy,” said the good old man, “remember that
|
||
no profession offers nobler opportunities for service to humanity
|
||
than that of education.” And what should he teach? “Philosophy is the
|
||
noblest study of man.” And a professor of philosophy the young Butcher
|
||
speedily became.
|
||
Those who were so fortunate as to study philosophy under him at
|
||
Pluribus will never forget how uncompromisingly he preached absolute
|
||
idealism, the Good, the True and the Beautiful, or how witheringly
|
||
he excoriated the mushroom philosophies which were springing up to
|
||
challenge the eternal verities. I have heard his old students remark
|
||
the secret anguish which must have been his when later, as president
|
||
of the university, he was compelled to entertain the famous Swiss
|
||
philosopher, Monsfilius, whose alluring empiricism was taking the
|
||
philosophic world by storm.
|
||
Dr. Butcher’s philosophic acuteness is only equaled by his political
|
||
rectitude. Indeed, it is as philosopher-politician that he holds the
|
||
unique place he does in our American life, injecting into the petty
|
||
issues of the political arena the immutable principles of Truth.
|
||
Early conscious of his duty as a man and a citizen, he joined the
|
||
historic party which had earned the eternal allegiance of the nation
|
||
by rescuing it from slavery. By faithful service to the chiefs of his
|
||
state organization, first under the powerful Flatt, and later under the
|
||
well-known Harnes, himself college-bred and a political philosopher of
|
||
no mean merit, the young Dr. Butcher worked his way up through ward
|
||
captain to the position of district leader. The practical example
|
||
of Dr. Butcher, the scholar and educator, leaving the peace of his
|
||
academic shades to carry the banner in the service of his party ideals
|
||
of Prosperity and Protection has been an inspiration to thousands
|
||
of educated men in these days of civic cowardice. When, three years
|
||
ago, his long and faithful services were rewarded by the honor of
|
||
second place on the Presidential ticket which swept the great states
|
||
of Mormonia and Green Mountain, there were none of his friends and
|
||
admirers who felt that the distinction was undeserved.
|
||
President Butcher is frequently called into the councils of the
|
||
party whenever there are resolutions to be drawn up or statements of
|
||
philosophic principle to be issued. He is in great demand also as
|
||
chairman of state conventions, which his rare academic distinction
|
||
lifts far above the usual level of such affairs. It was at one of
|
||
these conventions that he made the memorable speech in which he
|
||
drew the analogy between the immutability of Anglo-Saxon political
|
||
institutions and the multiplication table. To the applause of the keen
|
||
and hard-headed business men and lawyers who sat as delegates under
|
||
him, he scored with matchless satire the idea of progress in politics,
|
||
and demonstrated to their complete satisfaction that it was as absurd
|
||
to tinker with the fundamentals of our political system as it would be
|
||
to construct a new arithmetic. In such characteristic wisdom we have
|
||
the intellectual caliber of the man.
|
||
This brilliant and profound address came only as the fruit of a
|
||
lifetime of thought on political philosophy. President Butcher’s
|
||
treatise on “Why We Should Never Change Any Form of Government” has
|
||
been worth more to thoughtful men than thousands of sermons on civic
|
||
righteousness. No one who has ever heard President Butcher’s rotund
|
||
voice discuss in a public address “those ideas and practices which have
|
||
been tried and tested by a thousand years of experience” will ever
|
||
allow his mind to dwell again on the progressive and disintegrating
|
||
tendencies of the day, nor will he have the heart again to challenge on
|
||
any subject the “decent respect for the common opinions of mankind.”
|
||
President Butcher’s social philosophy is as sound as his political.
|
||
The flexibility of his mind is shown in the fact that, although an
|
||
immutabilist in politics, he is a staunch Darwinian in sociology.
|
||
Himself triumphantly fit, he never wearies of expressing his robust
|
||
contempt for the unfit who encumber the earth. His essay on “The
|
||
Insurrection of the Maladjusted” is already a classic in American
|
||
literature. The trenchant attack on modern social movements as the
|
||
impudent revolt of the unfit against those who, by their personal
|
||
merits and industry, have, like himself, achieved success, has been
|
||
a grateful bulwark to thousands who might otherwise have been swept
|
||
sentimentally from their moorings by those false guides who erect their
|
||
own weakness and failure into a criticism of society.
|
||
Dr. Butcher’s literary eminence has not only won him a chair in the
|
||
American Academy of All the Arts, Sciences, and Philosophies, but has
|
||
made him almost as well known abroad as at home. He has lectured
|
||
before the learned societies of Lisbon on “The American at Home,” and
|
||
he has a wide circle of acquaintances in every capital in Europe. Most
|
||
of the foreign universities have awarded him honorary degrees. In spite
|
||
of his stout Americanism, Dr. Butcher has one of the most cosmopolitan
|
||
of minds. His essay on “The Cosmopolitan Intellect” has been translated
|
||
into every civilized language. With his admired friend, Owen Griffith,
|
||
he has collaborated in the latter’s endeavor to beat the swords of
|
||
industrial exploitation into the ploughshares of universal peace. He
|
||
has served in numerous capacities on Griffith’s many peace boards and
|
||
foundations, and has advised him widely and well how to distribute his
|
||
millions so as to prevent the recurrence of war in future centuries.
|
||
Let it not be thought that, in recounting President Butcher’s public
|
||
life and services, I am minimizing his distinction as a university
|
||
administrator. As executive of one of the largest universities in
|
||
America, he has raised the position of college president to a dignity
|
||
surpassed by scarcely any office except President of the United States.
|
||
The splendid $125,000 mansion which President Butcher had the trustees
|
||
of Pluribus build for him on the heights overlooking the city, where
|
||
he entertains distinguished foreign guests with all the pomp worthy
|
||
of his high office, is the precise measure both of the majesty with
|
||
which he has endowed the hitherto relatively humble position, and the
|
||
appreciation of a grateful university. The relations between President
|
||
Butcher and the trustees of Pluribus have always been of the most
|
||
beautiful nature. The warm and profound intellectual sympathy which
|
||
he feels for the methods and practices of the financial and corporate
|
||
world, and the extensive personal affiliations he has formed with its
|
||
leaders, have made it possible to leave in his hands a large measure of
|
||
absolute authority. Huge endowments have made Pluribus under President
|
||
Butcher’s rule one of the wealthiest of our higher institutions of
|
||
learning. With a rare intuitive response to the spirit of the time, the
|
||
President has labored to make it the biggest and most comprehensive of
|
||
its kind. Already its schools are numbered by the dozens, its buildings
|
||
by the scores, its instructors by the hundreds, its students by the
|
||
thousands, its income by the millions, and its possessions by the tens
|
||
of millions.
|
||
None who have seen President Butcher in the commencement exercises
|
||
of Pluribus can ever forget the impressiveness of the spectacle. His
|
||
resemblance to Henry VIII is more marked now that he has donned the
|
||
crimson gown and flat hat of the famous English university which gave
|
||
him the degree of LL.D. Seated in a high-backed chair--the historic
|
||
chair of the first colonial president of Pluribus--surrounded by tier
|
||
upon tier of his retinue of the thousand professors of the university,
|
||
President Alexander Mackintosh Butcher presents the degrees, and in his
|
||
emphatic voice warns the five thousand graduates before him against
|
||
everything new, everything untried, everything untested.
|
||
Only one office could tempt President Butcher from his high estate. Yet
|
||
even those enthusiastic alumni and those devoted professors who long
|
||
to see him President of the United States have little hope of tempting
|
||
him from his duties to his alma mater. Having set his hand to the
|
||
plough, he must see Pluribus through her harvest season, and may God
|
||
prosper the work! So, beloved of all, alumni and instructors alike, the
|
||
idol of the undergraduates, a national oracle of Prosperity and Peace,
|
||
President Butcher passes to a green old age, a truly Olympian figure of
|
||
the time.
|
||
I read with ever-increasing wonder the guarded defenses and discreet
|
||
apologies for the older generation which keep filtering through
|
||
the essays of the _Atlantic_. I can even seem to detect a growing
|
||
decision of tone, a definite assurance of conviction, which seems to
|
||
imply that a rally has been undertaken against the accusations which
|
||
the younger generation, in its self-assurance, its irreverence for
|
||
the old conventions and moralities, its passion for the novel and
|
||
startling, seemed to be bringing against them. The first faint twinges
|
||
of conscience felt by the older generation have given place to renewed
|
||
homily. There is an evident anxiety to get itself put on record as
|
||
perfectly satisfied with its world, and desirous that its sons and
|
||
daughters should learn anew of those peculiar beauties in which it has
|
||
lived. Swept off its feet by the call to social service and social
|
||
reform, it is slowly regaining its foundation, and, slightly flushed,
|
||
and with garments somewhat awry, it proclaims again its belief in the
|
||
eternal verities of Protestant religion and conventional New England
|
||
morality.
|
||
It is always an encouraging sign when people are rendered
|
||
self-conscious and are forced to examine the basis of their ideals. The
|
||
demand that they explain them to skeptics always makes for clarity.
|
||
When the older generation is put on the defensive, it must first
|
||
discover what convictions it has, and then sharpen them to their finest
|
||
point in order to present them convincingly. There are always too many
|
||
unquestioned things in the world, and for a person or class to have to
|
||
scurry about to find reasons for its prejudices is about as healthy
|
||
an exercise as one could wish for either of them. To be sure, the
|
||
reasons are rarely any more than _ex post facto_ excuses,--supports
|
||
and justifications for the prejudices rather than the causes thereof.
|
||
Reason itself is very seldom more than that. The important point is
|
||
that one should feel the need of a reason. This always indicates that
|
||
something has begun to slide, that the world is no longer so secure as
|
||
it was, that obvious truths no longer are obvious, that the world has
|
||
begun to bristle with question marks.
|
||
One of the basic grievances of this older generation against the
|
||
younger of to-day, with its social agitation, its religious heresy,
|
||
its presumptive individuality, its economic restlessness, is that
|
||
all this makes it uncomfortable. When you have found growing older
|
||
to be a process of the reconciliation of the spirit to life, it is
|
||
decidedly disconcerting to have some youngster come along and point
|
||
out the irreconcilable things in the universe. Just as you have made
|
||
a tacit agreement to call certain things non-existent, it is highly
|
||
discommoding to have somebody shout with strident tones that they are
|
||
very real and significant. When, after much struggling and compromise,
|
||
you have got your world clamped down, it is discouraging to have a
|
||
gale arise which threatens to blow over all your structure. Through so
|
||
much of the current writing runs this quiet note of disapprobation.
|
||
These agnostic professors who unsettle the faith of our youth, these
|
||
“intellectuals who stick a finger in everybody’s pie in the name of
|
||
social justice,” these sensation-mongers who unveil great masses of
|
||
political and social corruption, these remorseless scientists who would
|
||
reveal so many of our reticences--why can’t they let us alone? Can they
|
||
not see that God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world?
|
||
Now I know this older generation which doth protest so much. I have
|
||
lived with it for the last fifteen years, ever since I began to wonder
|
||
whether all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds. I
|
||
was educated by it, grew up with it. I doubt if any generation ever
|
||
had a more docile pupil than I. What they taught me, I find they
|
||
still believe, or at least so many of them as have not gone over to
|
||
the enemy, or been captured by the militant youth of to-day. Or, as
|
||
seems rather likely, they no longer precisely believe, but they want
|
||
their own arguments to convince themselves. It is probable that when
|
||
we really believe a thing with all our hearts, we do not attempt to
|
||
justify it. Justification comes only when we are beginning to doubt it.
|
||
By this older generation I mean, of course, the mothers and fathers and
|
||
uncles and aunts of the youth of both sexes between twenty and thirty
|
||
who are beginning their professional or business life. And I refer
|
||
of course to the comfortable or fairly comfortable American middle
|
||
class. Now this older generation has had a religion, a metaphysics,
|
||
an ethics, and a political and social philosophy, which have reigned
|
||
practically undisputed until the appearance of the present generation.
|
||
It has at least never felt called upon to justify itself. It has never
|
||
been directly challenged, as it is to-day. In order to localize this
|
||
generation still further, we must see it in its typical setting of
|
||
the small town or city, clustered about the institutions of church
|
||
and family. If we have any society which can be called “American,” it
|
||
is this society. Its psychology is American psychology; its soul is
|
||
America’s soul.
|
||
This older generation, which I have known so well for fifteen years,
|
||
has a religion which is on the whole as pleasant and easy as could
|
||
be devised. Though its members are the descendants of the stern and
|
||
rugged old Puritans, who wrestled with the devil and stripped their
|
||
world of all that might seduce them from the awful service of God,
|
||
they have succeeded in straining away by a long process all the
|
||
repellent attitudes in the old philosophy of life. It is unfair to
|
||
say that the older generation believe in dogmas and creeds. It would
|
||
be more accurate to say that it does not disbelieve. It retains them
|
||
as a sort of guaranty of the stability of the faith, but leaves them
|
||
rather severely alone. It does not even make more than feeble efforts
|
||
to reinterpret them in the light of modern knowledge. They are useless,
|
||
but necessary.
|
||
The foundation of this religion may be religious, but the
|
||
superstructure is almost entirely ethical. Most sermons of to-day are
|
||
little more than pious exhortations to good conduct. By good conduct
|
||
is meant that sort of action which will least disturb the normal
|
||
routine of modern middle-class life: common honesty in business life,
|
||
faithfulness to duty, ambition in business and profession, filial
|
||
obligation, the use of talents, and always and everywhere simple human
|
||
kindness and love. The old Puritan ethics, which saw in the least issue
|
||
of conduct a struggle between God and the devil, has become a mere code
|
||
for facilitating the daily friction of conventional life.
|
||
Now one would indeed be churlish to find fault with this devout belief
|
||
in simple goodness, which characterizes the older generation. It is
|
||
only when these humble virtues are raised up into an all-inclusive
|
||
program for social reform and into a philosophy of life, that one
|
||
begins to question, and to feel afar the deep hostility of the older
|
||
generation to the new faith.
|
||
Simple kindness, common honesty, filial obedience, it is evidently
|
||
still felt, will solve all the difficulties of personal and social
|
||
life. The most popular novels of the day are those in which the
|
||
characters do the most good to each other. The enormous success with
|
||
the older generation of _The Inside of the Cup_, _Queed_, and _V.
|
||
V.’s Eyes_, is based primarily on the fact that these books represent
|
||
a sublimated form of the good old American melodramatic moral sense.
|
||
And now comes along Mr. Gerald Stanley Lee with his _Crowds_,--what a
|
||
funny, individualized, personal-responsibility crowd he gives us, to
|
||
be sure,--and his panacea for modern social ills by the old solution
|
||
of applied personal virtue. Never a word about removing the barriers
|
||
of caste and race and economic inequality, but only an urging to step
|
||
over them. Never a trumpet-call to level the ramparts of privilege,
|
||
or build up the heights of opportunity, but only an appeal to extend
|
||
the charitable hand from the ramparts of heaven, or offer the kindly
|
||
patronage to the less fortunate, or--most dazzling of all--throw
|
||
away, in a frenzy of abandonment, life and fortune. Not to construct
|
||
a business organization where dishonesty would be meaningless, but to
|
||
be utopianly honest against the business world. In other words, the
|
||
older generation believes in getting all the luxury of the virtue of
|
||
goodness, while conserving all the advantages of being in a vicious
|
||
society.
|
||
If there is any one characteristic which distinguishes the older
|
||
generation, it is this belief that social ills may be cured by personal
|
||
virtue. Its highest moral ideals are sacrifice and service. But the
|
||
older generation can never see how intensely selfish these ideals are,
|
||
in the most complete sense of the word selfish. What they mean always
|
||
is, “I sacrifice myself for you,” “I serve you,” not, “We coöperate
|
||
in working ceaselessly toward an ideal where all may be free and none
|
||
may be served or serve.” These ideals of sacrifice and service are
|
||
utterly selfish, because they take account only of the satisfaction
|
||
and moral consolidation of the doer. They enhance his moral value;
|
||
but what of the person who is served or sacrificed for? What of the
|
||
person who is done good to? If the feelings of sacrifice and service
|
||
were in any sense altruistic, the moral enhancement of the receiver
|
||
would be the object sought. But can it not be said that for every
|
||
individual virtuous merit secured by an act of sacrifice or service
|
||
on the part of the doer, there is a corresponding depression on the
|
||
part of the receiver? Do we not universally recognize this by calling
|
||
a person who is not conscious of this depression, a parasite, and the
|
||
person who is no longer capable of depression, a pauper? It is exactly
|
||
those free gifts, such as schools, libraries, and so forth, which are
|
||
impersonal or social, that we can accept gratefully and gladly; and it
|
||
is exactly because the ministrations of a Charity Organization Society
|
||
are impersonal and businesslike that they can be received willingly and
|
||
without moral depression by the poor.
|
||
The ideal of duty is equally open to attack. The great complaint of
|
||
the younger against the older generation has to do with the rigidity
|
||
of the social relationships into which the younger find themselves
|
||
born. The world seems to be full of what may be called canalized
|
||
emotions. One is “supposed” to love one’s aunt or one’s grandfather
|
||
in a certain definite way, at the risk of being “unnatural.” One gets
|
||
almost a sense of the quantitative measurement of emotion. Perhaps the
|
||
greatest tragedy of family life is the useless energy that is expended
|
||
by the dutiful in keeping these artificial channels open, and the
|
||
correct amount of current running. It is exactly this that produces
|
||
most infallibly the rebellion of the younger generation. To hear that
|
||
one ought to love this or that person; or to hear loyalty spoken of, as
|
||
the older generation so often speaks of it, as if it consisted in an
|
||
allegiance to something which one no longer believes in,--this is what
|
||
soonest liberates those forces of madness and revolt which bewilder
|
||
spiritual teachers and guides. It is those dry channels of duty and
|
||
obligation through which no living waters of emotion flow that it is
|
||
the ideal of the younger generation to break up. They will have no
|
||
network of emotional canals which are not brimming, no duties which are
|
||
not equally loves.
|
||
But when they are loves, you have duty no longer meaning very much.
|
||
Duty, like sacrifice and service, always implies a personal relation
|
||
of individuals. You are always doing your duty to somebody or
|
||
something. Always the taint of inequality comes in. You are morally
|
||
superior to the person who has duty done to him. If that duty is not
|
||
filled with good-will and desire, it is morally hateful, or at very
|
||
best, a necessary evil,--one of those compromises with the world which
|
||
must be made in order to get through it at all. But duty without
|
||
good-will is a compromise with our present state of inequality, and
|
||
to raise duty to the level of a virtue is to consecrate that state of
|
||
inequality forevermore.
|
||
It is the same thing with service. The older generation has attempted
|
||
an insidious compromise with the new social democracy by combining the
|
||
words “social” and “service.” Under cover of the ideal of service it
|
||
tries to appropriate to itself the glory of social work, and succeeds
|
||
in almost convincing itself and the world that its Christianity has
|
||
always held the same ideal. The faithful are urged to extend their
|
||
activities. The assumption is that, by doing good to more individuals,
|
||
you are thereby becoming social. But to speak of “social democracy,”
|
||
which of course means a freely coöperating, freely reciprocating
|
||
society of equals, and “service,” together, is a contradiction of
|
||
terms. For, when you serve people or do good to them, you thereby
|
||
render yourself unequal with them. You insult the democratic ideal.
|
||
If the service is compulsory, it is menial and you are inferior. If
|
||
voluntary, you are superior. The difference, however, is only academic.
|
||
The entire Christian scheme is a clever but unsuccessful attempt to
|
||
cure the evils of inequality by transposing the values. The slave
|
||
serves gladly instead of servilely. That is, he turns his master
|
||
into a slave. That is why good Christian people can never get over
|
||
the idea that Socialism means simply the triumph of one class over
|
||
another. To-day the proletarian is down, the capitalist up. To-morrow
|
||
the proletarian will be up and the capitalist down. To pull down the
|
||
mighty from their seats and exalt them of low degree is the highest
|
||
pitch to which Christian ethics ever attained. The failure of the older
|
||
generation to recognize a higher ethic, the ethic of democracy, is the
|
||
cause of all the trouble.
|
||
The notorious Victorian era, which in its secret heart this older
|
||
generation still admires so much, accentuated all the latent
|
||
individualism of Christian ethics, and produced a code which, without
|
||
the rebellion of the younger generation, would have spiritually
|
||
guaranteed forever all moral caste divisions and inequalities of
|
||
modern society. The Protestant Church, in which this exaggerated ethic
|
||
was enshrined, is now paying heavily the price of this debauch of
|
||
ethical power. Its rapidly declining numbers show that human nature
|
||
has an invincible objection to being individually saved. The Catholic
|
||
Church, which saves men as members of the Beloved Community, and not
|
||
as individuals, flourishes. When one is saved by Catholicism, one
|
||
becomes a democrat, and not a spiritual snob and aristocrat, as one
|
||
does through Calvinism. The older generation can never understand that
|
||
superb loyalty which is loyalty to a community,--a loyalty which,
|
||
paradoxical as it may seem, nourishes the true social personality in
|
||
proportion as the individual sense is lessened. The Protestant Church
|
||
in its tenacious devotion to the personal ideal of a Divine Master--the
|
||
highest and most popular Christian ideal of to-day--shows how very far
|
||
it still is away from the ideals and ethics of a social democracy, a
|
||
life lived in the Beloved Community.
|
||
The sense of self-respect is the very keystone of the personality in
|
||
whose defence all this individualistic philosophy has been carefully
|
||
built up. The Christian virtues date from ages when there was a vastly
|
||
greater number of morally depressed people than there is now. The
|
||
tenacious survival of these virtues can be due only to the fact that
|
||
they were valuable to the moral prestige of some class. Our older
|
||
generation, with its emphasis on duty, sacrifice, and service, shows us
|
||
very clearly what those interests were. I deliberately accuse the older
|
||
generation of conserving and greatly strengthening these ideals, as a
|
||
defensive measure. Morals are always the product of a situation; they
|
||
reflect a certain organization of human relations which some class or
|
||
group wishes to preserve. A moral code or set of ideals is always the
|
||
invisible spiritual sign of a visible social grace. In an effort to
|
||
retain the _status quo_ of that world of inequalities and conventions
|
||
in which they most comfortably and prosperously live, the older
|
||
generation has stamped, through all its agencies of family, church and
|
||
school, upon the younger generation, just those seductive ideals which
|
||
would preserve its position. These old virtues upon which, however, the
|
||
younger generation is already making guerilla warfare are simply the
|
||
moral support with which the older generation buttresses its social
|
||
situation.
|
||
The natural barriers and prejudices by which our elders are cut
|
||
off from a freely flowing democracy are thus given a spiritual
|
||
justification, and there is added for our elders the almost sensual
|
||
luxury of leaping, by free grace, the barriers and giving themselves
|
||
away. But the price has to be paid. Just as profits, in the socialist
|
||
philosophy, are taken to be an abstraction from wages, through the
|
||
economic power which one class has over another, so the virtues of the
|
||
older generation may be said to be an abstraction from the virtue of
|
||
other classes less favorably situated from a moral or personal point of
|
||
view. Their swollen self-respect is at the expense of others.
|
||
How well we know the type of man in the older generation who has been
|
||
doing good all his life! How his personality has thriven on it! How he
|
||
has ceaselessly been storing away moral fat in every cranny of his
|
||
soul! His goodness has been meat to him. The need and depression of
|
||
other people has been, all unconsciously to him, the air which he has
|
||
breathed. Without their compensating misfortune or sin, his goodness
|
||
would have wilted and died. If good people would earnestly set to
|
||
work to make the world uniformly healthy, courageous, beautiful, and
|
||
prosperous, the field of their vocation would be constantly limited,
|
||
and finally destroyed. That they so stoutly resist all philosophies
|
||
and movements which have these ends primarily in view is convincing
|
||
evidence of the fierce and jealous egoism which animates their so
|
||
plausibly altruistic spirit. One suspects that the older generation
|
||
does not want its vocation destroyed. It takes an heroic type of
|
||
goodness to undermine all the foundations on which our virtue rests.
|
||
If then I object to the ethical philosophy of the older generation on
|
||
the ground that it is too individualistic, and, under the pretense
|
||
of altruism, too egoistic, I object to its general intellectuality
|
||
as not individual enough. Intellectually the older generation seems
|
||
to me to lead far too vegetative a life. It may be that this life
|
||
has been lived on the heights, that these souls have passed through
|
||
fires and glories, but there is generally too little objective
|
||
evidence of this subjective fact. If the intuition which accompanies
|
||
experience has verified all the data regarding God, the soul, the
|
||
family, and so forth,--to quote one of the staunchest defenders of the
|
||
generation,--this verification seems to have been obtained rather that
|
||
the issues might be promptly disposed of and forgotten. Certainly the
|
||
older generation is rarely interested in the profounder issues of life.
|
||
It never speaks of death,--the suggestion makes it uncomfortable. It
|
||
shies in panic at hints of sex-issues. It seems resolute to keep life
|
||
on as objective a plane as possible. It is no longer curious about
|
||
the motives and feelings of people. It seems singularly to lack the
|
||
psychological sense. If it gossips, it recounts actions, effects; it
|
||
rarely seeks to interpret. It tends more and more to treat human beings
|
||
as moving masses of matter instead of as personalities filled with
|
||
potent influence, or as absorbingly interesting social types, as I am
|
||
sure the younger generation does.
|
||
The older generation seems no longer to generalize, although it
|
||
gives every evidence of having once prodigiously generalized, for
|
||
its world is all hardened and definite. There are the good and the
|
||
criminal, and the poor, the people who can be called nice, and the
|
||
ordinary people. The world is already plotted out. Now I am sure
|
||
that the generalizations of the truly philosophical mind are very
|
||
fluid and ephemeral. They are no sooner made than the mind sees their
|
||
insufficiency and has to break them up. A new cutting is made, only in
|
||
turn to be shaken and rearranged. This keeps the philosopher thinking
|
||
all the time, and it makes his world a very uncertain place. But he
|
||
at least runs no risk of hardening, and he has his eyes open to most
|
||
experience.
|
||
I am often impressed with the fact that the older generation has grown
|
||
weary of thinking. It has simply put up the bars in its intellectual
|
||
shop-windows and gone off home to rest. It may well be that this is
|
||
because it has felt so much sorrow that it does not want to talk about
|
||
sorrow, or so much love that to interpret love tires it, or repulsed
|
||
so many rude blows of destiny that it has no interest in speaking of
|
||
destiny. Its flame may be low for the very reason that it has burned
|
||
so intensely. But how many of the younger generation would eagerly
|
||
long for such interpretations if the older would only reveal them!
|
||
And how little plausible is that experience when it is occasionally
|
||
interpreted! No, enthusiasm, passion for ideas, sensuality, religious
|
||
fervor,--all the heated weapons with which the younger generation
|
||
attacks the world, seem only to make the older generation uneasy. The
|
||
spirit, in becoming reconciled to life, has lost life itself.
|
||
As I see the older generation going through its daily round of
|
||
business, church, and family life, I cannot help feeling that its
|
||
influence is profoundly pernicious. It has signally failed to broaden
|
||
its institutions for the larger horizon of the time. The church remains
|
||
a private club of comfortable middle-class families, while outside
|
||
there grows up without spiritual inspiration a heterogeneous mass of
|
||
people without ties, roots, or principles. The town changes from a
|
||
village to an industrial center, and church and school go through their
|
||
time-honored and listless motions. The world widens, society expands,
|
||
formidable crises appear, but the older generation does not broaden, or
|
||
if it does, the broadening is in no adequate proportion to our needs.
|
||
The older generation still uses the old ideas for the new problem.
|
||
Whatever new wine it finds must be poured into the old bottles.
|
||
Where are the leaders among the older generation in America who,
|
||
with luminous faith and intelligence, are rallying around them the
|
||
disintegrated numbers of idealistic youth, as Bergson and Barrès
|
||
and Jaurès have done in France? A few years ago there seemed to be
|
||
a promise of a forward movement toward Democracy, led by embattled
|
||
veterans in a war against privilege. But how soon the older generation
|
||
became wearied in the march! What is left now of that shining army and
|
||
its leader? Must the younger generation eternally wait for the sign?
|
||
The answer is, of course, that it will not wait. It must shoulder
|
||
the gigantic task of putting into practice its ideals and
|
||
revolutionary points of view as wholeheartedly and successfully as
|
||
our great-grandfathers applied theirs and tightened the philosophy
|
||
of life which imprisons the older generation. The shuddering fear
|
||
that we in turn may become weary, complacent, evasive, should be the
|
||
best preventive of that stagnation. We shall never have done looking
|
||
for the miracle, that it shall be given us to lighten, cheer, and
|
||
purify our “younger generation,” even as our older has depressed and
|
||
disintegrated us.
|
||
No Easterner, born forlornly within the sphere of New York, Boston, or
|
||
Philadelphia, can pass very far beyond the Alleghanies without feeling
|
||
that American civilization is here found in the full tide of believing
|
||
in itself. The flat countryside looks more ordered, more farmlike; the
|
||
Main Streets that flash by the car-windows somehow look more robust and
|
||
communal. There may be no less litter and scrubbiness; the clustered
|
||
houses of the towns may look even more flimsy, undistinguished,
|
||
well-worn; but it is a litter of aspiring order, a chaos which the
|
||
people are insensitive to because they are living in the light of a
|
||
hopeful future. The East has pretty much abandoned itself to the tides
|
||
of immigration and industrial change which have overwhelmed it: no one
|
||
really believes that anything startling will be done to bring about a
|
||
new heaven and a new earth. But the intelligence of the West seems to
|
||
live in apocalyptic sociological--not socialistic, however--dreams.
|
||
Architects and business men combine half-heartedly to “save New York”
|
||
from the horrors of the Jewish clothing-trade invasion, but Chicago
|
||
draws great maps and sketches of a city-planning that shall make it not
|
||
only habitable but radiant and palatial.
|
||
Hope has not vanished from the East, but it has long since ceased
|
||
to be our daily diet. Europe has infected us perhaps with some of
|
||
its world-weariness. The East produces more skeptics and spiritual
|
||
malcontents than the West. For the Middle West seems to have
|
||
accomplished most of the things, industrial and political, that the
|
||
East has been trying to do, and it has done them better. The Middle
|
||
West is the apotheosis of American civilization, and like all successes
|
||
it is in no mood to be very critical of itself or very examinatory
|
||
as to the anatomy and physiology of its social being. No Easterner
|
||
with Meredith Nicholson’s human and literary experience would write
|
||
so complacently and cheerfully about his part of the country as Mr.
|
||
Nicholson writes about “The Valley of Democracy.” His self-confidence
|
||
is the very voice of the Middle West, telling us what it thinks of
|
||
itself. This, we say as we read, must be the inner candor which goes
|
||
with the West that we see with our eyes. So we like Mr. Nicholson’s
|
||
articles not so much for the information they give us as for the
|
||
attitudes they let slip, the unconscious revelations of what the people
|
||
he is talking for think important.
|
||
It is not a book of justification, although he would rather anxiously
|
||
have us take not too seriously the political vagaries like Bryanism and
|
||
Progressivism. And he wishes us to miss none of the symphony orchestras
|
||
and art institutes that evidently now begin to grow like grasshoppers
|
||
on the prairies. He treats himself rather as an expositor, and he
|
||
is explicitly informational, almost as if for a foreign country. He
|
||
sometimes has an amusing air of having hastily read up and investigated
|
||
Western wonders and significances that have been not only common
|
||
material in the Eastern magazines, but matter of despairing admiration
|
||
on the part of those of us who are general improvers of mankind. He
|
||
is naïve about the greatness of Chicago, the vastness of agricultural
|
||
production, the ravages of culture among the middle classes. He is
|
||
almost the professional Westerner showing off his prize human stock.
|
||
Mr. Nicholson does well to begin with the folksiness of the West. No
|
||
one who has experienced that fine open friendliness of the prosperous
|
||
Middle Westerner, that pleasant awareness of the alert and beneficent
|
||
world we live in, can deny that the Middle West is quite justified in
|
||
thinking of itself as the real heart of the nation. That belief in the
|
||
ultimate good sense, breadth of vision, and devotion to the common
|
||
good, of the “folks back home,” is in itself a guaranty of social
|
||
stability and of a prosperity which implies that things will never be
|
||
any different except as they slowly improve. Who can say that we have
|
||
no Gemüthlichkeit in America, when he runs up against this warm social
|
||
mixability which goes so far to compensate for the lack of intellectual
|
||
_nuances_ and spontaneous artistic sensibilities?
|
||
Of course the Middle West has to pay for its social responsiveness
|
||
in a failure to create, at least in this day and generation, very
|
||
vigorous and diverse spiritual types. An excessive amiability, a genius
|
||
for adaptability will, in the end, put a premium on conformity. The
|
||
Westerner sincerely believes that he is more averse to conventionality
|
||
than the Easterner, but the latter does not find him so. The heretic
|
||
seems to have a much harder time of it in the West. Classes and
|
||
attitudes that have offended against the “folks’” codes may be actually
|
||
outlawed. When there are acute differences of opinion, as in the war,
|
||
society splits into bitter and irreconcilable camps, whereas in the
|
||
East the undesirables have been allowed to shade off towards limbo
|
||
in gradual degrees. When hatred and malice, too long starved by too
|
||
much “niceness,” do break out from the natural man, they may produce
|
||
those waves of persecution and vindictiveness which, coming from a so
|
||
recently pacifist West, astonished an East that was no less densely
|
||
saturated with aliens but was more conversant with the feeling that it
|
||
takes all kinds of people to make a world. Folksiness evidently has its
|
||
dark underlining in a tendency to be stampeded by herd-emotion. “Social
|
||
conscience” may become the duty to follow what the mob demands, and
|
||
democracy may come to mean that the individual feels himself somehow
|
||
expressed--his private tastes and intelligence--in whatever the crowd
|
||
chooses to do.
|
||
I have followed Mr. Nicholson in his speaking of the Middle West as
|
||
if he thought of the region as a unit. He does speak as if he did,
|
||
but he does not really mean it. Much as he would like to believe in
|
||
the substantial equality of the people in the Valley of Democracy, he
|
||
cannot help letting us see that it is but one class that he has in
|
||
mind--his own, the prosperous people of the towns. He protests against
|
||
their being scornfully waved aside as bourgeoisie. “They constitute
|
||
the most interesting and admirable of our social strata.” And he is
|
||
quite right. Certainly this stratum is by far the most admirable of all
|
||
the middle classes of the world. It is true that “nowhere else have
|
||
comfort, opportunity, and aspiration produced the same combination.” He
|
||
marvels at the numbers of homes in the cities that cannot imaginably
|
||
be supported on less than five thousand a year. And it is these homes,
|
||
and their slightly more impoverished neighbors, who are for him the
|
||
“folks,” the incarnate Middle West. The proletarian does not exist for
|
||
him. The working-classes are merely so much cement, filling in the
|
||
bricks of the temple--or, better, folks in embryo, potential owners of
|
||
bungalows on pleasant suburban streets. Mr. Nicholson’s enthusiasm is
|
||
for the college-girl wife, who raises babies, attends women’s clubs,
|
||
and is not afraid to dispense with the unattainable servant. It is
|
||
for the good-natured and public-spirited business man, who goes into
|
||
politics because politics in the Middle West has always been concerned
|
||
with the prosperity of the business community. But about the economic
|
||
foundation of this class Mr. Nicholson sounds as innocent as a babe.
|
||
Take his attitude towards the farmer. You gather from these pages
|
||
that in the Middle West the farmer is a somewhat unfortunate anomaly,
|
||
a shadow on the bright scene. Farming is scarcely even a respectable
|
||
profession: “the great-grandchildren of the Middle Western pioneers
|
||
are not easily persuaded that farming is an honorable calling”! He
|
||
hints darkly at a decay in fiber. Only one chapter out of six is given
|
||
to the farmer, and that is largely occupied with the exertions of
|
||
state agencies, universities, to lift him out of his ignorance and
|
||
selfishness. The average farmer has few of the admirable qualities
|
||
of the Valley of Democracy. He is not “folksy”; he is suspicious,
|
||
conservative, somewhat embittered, little given to coöperation;
|
||
he even needed prodding with his Liberty bonds. In Mr. Nicholson’s
|
||
pages the farmer becomes a huge problem which lies on the brain and
|
||
conscience of a Middle West that can only act towards him in its best
|
||
moments like a sort of benevolent Charity Organization Society. “To
|
||
the average urban citizen,” says Mr. Nicholson, “farming is something
|
||
remote and uninteresting, carried on by men he never meets in regions
|
||
that he only observes hastily from a speeding automobile or the window
|
||
of a limited train.”
|
||
It would take whole volumes to develop the implications of that
|
||
sentence. Remember that that urban citizen is Mr. Nicholson’s Middle
|
||
West, and that the farmer comprises the huge bulk of the population.
|
||
Is this not interesting, the attitude of the prosperous minority of an
|
||
urban minority--a small but significant class which has in its hands
|
||
all the non-productive business and political power--towards the great
|
||
productive mass of the people? Could class division be revealed in
|
||
plainer terms? This Middle West of Mr. Nicholson’s class sees itself
|
||
as not only innocent of exploitation, but full of all the personal and
|
||
social virtues besides. But does the farmer see this class in this
|
||
light? He does not. And Mr. Veblen has given us in one of his books an
|
||
analysis of this society which may explain why: “The American country
|
||
town and small city,” he says, “is a business community, that is to
|
||
say it lives for and by business traffic, primarily of a merchandising
|
||
sort.... Municipal politics is conducted as in some sort a public
|
||
or overt extension of that private or covert organization of local
|
||
interests that watches over the joint pecuniary benefit of the local
|
||
businessmen. It is a means ... of safe-guarding the local business
|
||
community against interlopers and against any evasive tactics on the
|
||
part of the country population that serves as a host.... The country
|
||
town is a product and exponent of the American land system. In its
|
||
beginning it is located and ‘developed’ as an enterprise of speculation
|
||
in land values; that is to say, it is a businesslike endeavor to get
|
||
something for nothing by engrossing as much as may be of the increment
|
||
of land values due to the increase of population and the settlement
|
||
and cultivation of the adjacent agricultural area. It never (hitherto)
|
||
loses this character of real-estate speculation. This affords a common
|
||
bond and a common ground of pecuniary interest, which commonly
|
||
masquerades under the name of public patriotism, public spirit, civic
|
||
pride, and the like.”
|
||
In other words, Town, in the traditional American scheme of things,
|
||
is shown charging Country all the traffic will bear. It would be hard
|
||
to find a member of Mr. Nicholson’s Middle West--that minority urban
|
||
class--who was not owing his prosperity to some form of industrial
|
||
or real-estate speculation, of brokerage business enterprise, or
|
||
landlordism. This class likes to say sometimes that it is “carrying
|
||
the farmer.” It would be more like the truth to say that the farmer is
|
||
carrying this class. Country ultimately has to support Town; and Town,
|
||
by holding control of the channels of credit and market, can make the
|
||
farmer pay up to the hilt for the privilege of selling it his product.
|
||
And does. When the farmers, getting a sense of the true workings of the
|
||
society they live in, combine in a Non-Partisan League to control the
|
||
organism of market and credit, they find they have a bitter class war
|
||
on their hands. And the authentic voice of Mr. Nicholson here scolds
|
||
them roundly for their restlessness and sedition. In this ferocious
|
||
reaction of Town against Country’s socialistic efforts to give itself
|
||
economic autonomy, we get the betrayal of the social malaise of the
|
||
Middle West, a confession of the cleavage of latent class conflict in
|
||
a society as exploitative, as steeply tilted, as tragically extreme
|
||
in its poles of well-being, as any other modern society based on the
|
||
economic absolutism of property.
|
||
A large part of the hopefulness, the spiritual comfort of the Middle
|
||
West, of its sturdy belief in itself, must be based on the inflexible
|
||
reluctance of its intelligentsia to any such set of ideas. However
|
||
thoroughly Marxian ideas may have saturated the thought of Europe
|
||
and become the intellectual explosive of social change, the Middle
|
||
West, as in this book, persists in its robust resistance to any such
|
||
analysis or self-knowledge. It is not that Mr. Nicholson’s attitudes
|
||
are not true. It is that they are so very much less than the whole
|
||
truth. They need to be supplemented by analysis set in the terms in
|
||
which the progressive minds of the rest of the world are thinking.
|
||
The intelligent Middle West needs to sacrifice a certain amount of
|
||
complacency in exchange for an understanding of the structure of
|
||
its own society. It would then realize that to read “The Valley of
|
||
Democracy” in conjunction with pages 315-323 of Veblen’s “Imperial
|
||
Germany and the Industrial Revolution” is to experience one of the most
|
||
piquant intellectual adventures granted to the current mind.
|
||
ERNEST: OR, PARENT FOR A DAY
|
||
I had been talking rather loosely about the bringing-up of children.
|
||
They had been lately appearing to me in the guise of infinitely
|
||
prevalent little beings who impressed themselves almost too vividly
|
||
upon one’s consciousness. My summer vacation I had passed in a
|
||
household where a vivacious little boy of two years and a solemn little
|
||
boy of six months had turned their mother into a household slave. I had
|
||
seen walks, conversations, luncheons, and all the amenities of summer
|
||
civilized life, shot to pieces by the indomitable need of imperious
|
||
little children to be taken care of. Little boys who came running at
|
||
you smiling, stubbed their toes, and were instantly transformed into
|
||
wailing inconsolables; babies who woke importunately at ten o’clock in
|
||
the evening, and had to be brought down warm and blinking before the
|
||
fire; human beings who were not self-regulating, but to whom every
|
||
hard surface, every protuberance, was a menace to happiness, and in
|
||
whom every want and sensation was an order and claim upon somebody
|
||
else--these were new offerings to my smooth and independent existence.
|
||
They interested and perturbed me.
|
||
The older little boy, with his sunny luxuriance of hair and cheek,
|
||
was always on the point of saying something novel and disconcerting.
|
||
The baby, with his deep black eyes, seemed to be waiting silently and
|
||
in soft anticipation for life. He would look at you so calmly and yet
|
||
so eagerly, and give you a pleasant satisfaction that just your mere
|
||
presence, your form, your movement, were etching new little lines on
|
||
his cortex, sending new little shoots of feeling through his nerves.
|
||
You were being part of his education just by letting his consciousness
|
||
look at you. I liked particularly to hold my watch to his ear, and
|
||
see the sudden grave concentration of his face, as he called all his
|
||
mind to the judgment of this arresting phenomenon. I would love to
|
||
accost him as he lay murmuring in his carriage, and to check his little
|
||
breakings into tears by quick movements of my hands. He would watch me
|
||
intently for a while until the fact of his little restless woe would
|
||
come upon him again. I was challenged then to something more startling,
|
||
and the woe would disappear in little short gasps. But I would find
|
||
that he was subject to the law of diminishing returns. The moment would
|
||
arrive when the woe submerged everything in a wail, and his mother
|
||
would have to be called to nurse or coddle him in the magical motherly
|
||
way.
|
||
The baby I found perhaps more interesting than his little brother,
|
||
for the baby’s moods had more style to them. The brother could be
|
||
transformed from golden prattlingness to raging storm, with the most
|
||
disconcerting quickness. He could want the most irrational things with
|
||
an intensity that got itself expressed in hypnotic reiteration. Some
|
||
smoldering will-to-power in one’s self told one that a child should
|
||
never be given the thing that he most wanted; and yet in five minutes
|
||
one would have given him one’s soul, to be rid of the brazen rod which
|
||
he pounded through one. But I could not keep away from him. He and
|
||
his baby brother absorbed me, and when I contemplated their mother’s
|
||
life, I had many a solemn sense of the arduousness of being a parent.
|
||
I thought of the long years ahead of them, and the incalculability of
|
||
their manifestations. I shuddered and remained, gloating, I am afraid,
|
||
a little over the opportunity of enjoyment without responsibility.
|
||
All these things I was recounting the other evening after dinner to a
|
||
group of friends who professionally look after the minds and bodies
|
||
of the neglected. I was explaining my absorption, and the perils
|
||
and merciless tyranny of the mother’s life, and my thankfulness at
|
||
having been so much in, and yet so much not of, the child-world. I
|
||
was not responsible, and the policeman mother could be called in at
|
||
any time to soothe or to quell. I could always maintain the amused
|
||
aloofness which is my usual attitude toward children. And I made the
|
||
point that parenthood must become less arduous after the child is a
|
||
self-regulating little organism, and can be trusted not to commit
|
||
suicide inadvertently over every threshold, can feed himself, dress
|
||
himself, and take himself reasonably around. I even suggested unwarily
|
||
that after five or six the tyranny was much mitigated.
|
||
There was strong dissent. Just at that age, I was told, the real
|
||
responsibilities began. I was living in a fool’s paradise of
|
||
bachelordom if I thought that at six children were grown-up. One of the
|
||
women before the fire made it her business to get children adopted. I
|
||
had a sense of foreboding before she spoke. She promptly confirmed my
|
||
intuition by offering to endow me with an infant of six years, for a
|
||
day or for as long as I would take him. The hearty agreement of the
|
||
rest amazed and alarmed me. They seemed delighted at the thought of my
|
||
becoming parent for a day. I should have Ernest. They all knew Ernest;
|
||
and I should have him. They seemed to have no concern that he would not
|
||
survive my brief parenthood. It rather warmed and flattered me to think
|
||
that they trusted me.
|
||
I had a sense of being caught in an inescapable net, prisoner of my own
|
||
theories. If children of six were no longer tyrants, the possession
|
||
of Ernest would not interfere with my work or my life. I had spoken
|
||
confidently. I had a reputation among my friends of speaking eloquently
|
||
about “the child.” And I always find it almost impossible to resist the
|
||
offer of new experience. I hesitated and was lost. I even found myself
|
||
naming the day for Ernest’s momentary adoption. And during all that
|
||
week I found it increasingly impossible to forget him. The night before
|
||
Ernest was to come I told myself that I could not believe that this
|
||
perilous thing was about to happen to me. I made no preparations to
|
||
receive Ernest in my tiny bachelor apartment. I felt that I was in the
|
||
hands of fate.
|
||
I was not really surprised when fate knocked at the door next morning
|
||
in the person of my grinning friend, and swiftly left a well-bundled
|
||
little boy with me. I have rarely seen a young woman look as
|
||
maliciously happy as did his guide when she left, with the remark that
|
||
she couldn’t possibly come for Ernest that evening, but would take him
|
||
at nine o’clock on the morrow. My first quick resentment was stilled by
|
||
the thought that perhaps an official day was a day plus a night. But
|
||
Ernest loomed formidably at me. There would be problems of sleeping.
|
||
Was I a victim? Well, that is what parents were! They should not find
|
||
me weak.
|
||
Ernest expressed no aversion to staying with me. He was cheerful, a
|
||
little embarrassed, incurious. The removal of his hat disclosed a
|
||
Dutch-cut of yellow hair, blue eyes, many little freckles, and an
|
||
expression of slightly quizzical good-humor. I really had not had the
|
||
least conception how big a boy of six was likely to be, and I found
|
||
comfort in the evidence that he was big enough to be self-regulating,
|
||
and yet deliciously small enough to be watched over. He could be played
|
||
with, and without danger of breaking him.
|
||
Ernest sat passively on a chair and surveyed the room. I had thought a
|
||
little pedantically of exposing him to some Montessori apparatus. I had
|
||
got nothing, however. The room suddenly became very inane; the piano
|
||
a huge packing-box, the bookcases offensive, idiotic shelves. A silly
|
||
room to live in! A room practically useless for these new and major
|
||
purposes of life. I was ashamed of my surroundings, for I felt that
|
||
Ernest was surveying me with contempt and reproach.
|
||
It suddenly seemed as if little boys must like to look at pictures.
|
||
Ernest had clambered up into a big chair, and was sitting flattened
|
||
against its back, his legs sticking straight out in front of him, and
|
||
a look of mild lassitude on his face. He took with some alacrity the
|
||
illustrated newspaper supplement which I gave him, but my conscience
|
||
tortured me a little as to whether his interest was the desperate
|
||
one of demanding something for his mind to feed on, however arid it
|
||
might be, or whether it was a genuine æsthetic response. He gave all
|
||
the pictures exactly the same amount of time, rubbing his hand over
|
||
each to make sure that it was flat, and he showed no desire to talk
|
||
about anything he had seen. Since most of the pictures were of war,
|
||
my pacifist spirit rebelled against dwelling on them. His celerity
|
||
dismayed me. It became necessary to find more pictures. I had a sudden
|
||
horror of an afternoon of picture-books, each devoured in increasingly
|
||
accelerated fashion. How stupid seemed my rows of dully printed books!
|
||
Not one of them could disgorge a picture, no matter how hard you shook
|
||
it. Despair seized me when I found only a German handbook of Greek
|
||
sculpture, and another of Michelangelo. In hopeful trepidation I began
|
||
on them. I wondered how long they would last.
|
||
It was clearly an unfamiliar field to Ernest. My attempts to test his
|
||
classical knowledge were a failure. He recognized the Greeks as men
|
||
and women, but not as gods, and there were moments when I was afraid
|
||
he felt their nudity as indecent. He insisted on calling the Winged
|
||
Victory an angel. There had evidently been religion in Ernest’s career.
|
||
I told him that these were pictures of marble statues from Greece,
|
||
of gods and things, and I hurriedly sketched such myths as I could
|
||
remember in an attempt to overtake Ernest’s headlong rush of interest.
|
||
But he did not seem to listen, and he ended by calling every flowing
|
||
female form an angel. He laughed greatly at their missing arms and
|
||
heads. I do not think I quite impressed him with the Greek spirit.
|
||
On Michelangelo there was chance to test his Biblical background. He
|
||
proved never to have heard of David, and took the story I told him
|
||
with a little amused and incredulous chortle. Moses was new to him,
|
||
and I could not make him feel the majesty of the horns and beard.
|
||
When we came to the Sistine I felt the constraint of theology. Should
|
||
I point out to him God and Adam and Eve, and so perhaps fix in his
|
||
infant mind an ineradicable theological bias? Now I understand the
|
||
temptation which every parent must suffer, to dose his child with easy
|
||
mythology. Something urged me to say, Adam was the first man and Eve
|
||
was the first woman, and get the vague glow of having imparted godly
|
||
information. But I am glad that I had the strength sternly to refrain,
|
||
hoping that Ernest was too intellectually robust to be trifled with. I
|
||
confined myself to pointing out the sweep of clouds, the majesty of the
|
||
prophets, the cracks in the plaster, the mighty forms of the sibyls.
|
||
But with my last sibyl I was trapped. It smote my thought that there
|
||
were no more pictures. And Ernest’s passivity had changed. We were
|
||
sitting on the floor, and his limbs began to take on movement. He
|
||
crawled about, and I thought began to look menacingly at movable
|
||
objects on tables. My phobia of the combination of movable objects
|
||
and children returned. Parenthood suddenly seemed the most difficult
|
||
thing in the world. Ernest was not talking very much, and I doubted my
|
||
ability to hold him very long entranced in conversation. Imagination
|
||
came to my relief in the thought of a suburban errand. I remembered a
|
||
wonderful day when I myself had been taken by my uncle to the next town
|
||
on a journey--the long golden afternoon, the thundering expresses at
|
||
the station, the amazing watch which he had unaccountably presented me
|
||
with at the end of the day. Ernest should be taken to Brookfield.
|
||
Our lunch had to be taken at the railroad station. Ernest climbed with
|
||
much puffing up to the high stool by the lunch-counter, and sat there
|
||
unsteadily and triumphantly while I tried to think what little boys ate
|
||
for their lunch. My decision for scrambled eggs and a glass of milk was
|
||
unwise. The excitement of feeding scrambled eggs to a slippery little
|
||
boy on top of a high stool was full of incredible thrills. The business
|
||
of preventing a deluge of milk whenever Ernest touched his glass forced
|
||
me to an intellectual concentration which quite made me forget my own
|
||
eating. Ernest himself seemed in a state of measureless satisfaction;
|
||
but the dizzy way in which he brandished his fork, the hairbreadth
|
||
escape of those morsels of food as they passed over the abyss of his
|
||
lap, the new and strange impression of smearedness one got from his
|
||
face, kept me in a state of absorption until I found we had but one
|
||
minute to catch our train. With Ernest clutching a large buttered roll
|
||
which he had decently refused to relinquish, we rushed through the
|
||
gates.
|
||
When the candy-man came through the train, Ernest asked me in the most
|
||
detached tone in the world if I was going to buy any candy. And I asked
|
||
him with a similar dryness what his preferences in candy were. He
|
||
expressed a cool interest in lemon-drops. The marvelous way in which
|
||
Ernest did not eat those lemon-drops gave me a new admiration for his
|
||
self-control. He finished his buttered roll, gazed out of the window,
|
||
casually ate two or three lemon-drops, and then carefully closed
|
||
the box and put it in his pocket. I was almost jealous of Ernest’s
|
||
character. I recalled my incorrigible nibblings. I predicted for Ernest
|
||
a moral life.
|
||
Our talk was mostly of the things that flashed past our eyes. I was
|
||
interested in Ernest’s intellectual background. Out of the waste of
|
||
sign-boards and salt-meadows there was occasionally disentangled a
|
||
river with boats or a factory or a lumber-yard which Ernest could be
|
||
called upon to identify. He was in great good humor, squirming on his
|
||
seat, and he took delight in naming things and in telling me of other
|
||
trips on the railroad he had taken. He did not ask where we were going.
|
||
I told him, but it seemed not especially to concern him. He was living
|
||
in life’s essential,--excitement,--and neither the future nor the past
|
||
mattered. He held his own ticket a little incredulously, but without
|
||
that sense of the importance of the business that I had looked for. I
|
||
found it harder and harder not to treat him as an intellectual equal.
|
||
In Brookfield I became conscious of a desire to show Ernest off. I
|
||
was acquiring a proprietary interest in him. I was getting proud of
|
||
his good temper, his intelligence, his self-restraint, his capacity
|
||
for enjoying himself. I wanted to see my pride reflected in another
|
||
mind. I would take him to my wise old friend, Beulah. I knew how
|
||
pleasurably mystified she would be at my sudden possession of a chubby,
|
||
yellow-haired little boy of six.
|
||
Ernest had a delightful hour on Beulah’s parlor floor. He turned
|
||
somersaults, he shouted, he played that I was an evil monster who was
|
||
trying to catch him. He would crawl up warily towards me and put his
|
||
hand on my sleepily outstretched palm. As I suddenly woke and seized
|
||
him, he would dart away in shrieks of fear and glee. When I caught
|
||
him, I would feel like a grim ogre indeed, for his face would cloud
|
||
and little tears shoot into his eyes, and his lips would curl in
|
||
mortal fear. And then I would let him go tugging and sprawling, and
|
||
he would yell with joy, and steal back with ever-renewed cunning and
|
||
watchfulness. When he had eaten Beulah’s cakes and drunk her cocoa, he
|
||
lay back in a big chair, glowing with rosiness, and still laughing at
|
||
the thought of his escape from my ogredom.
|
||
Our minds played about him. I tried to tease Beulah into adopting him.
|
||
We spoke of his birth in a reformatory, and the apparently indomitable
|
||
way in which nature had erased this fact from his personality. We
|
||
wondered about his unknown mother, and his still more unknown father,
|
||
and what he would be and how either of us could help keeping him
|
||
forever. She pleaded her Man, I my poverty. But we were not convincing,
|
||
and I began to conceive a vague fear of Ernest’s adopting me, because I
|
||
could not let him go.
|
||
And then it was time for the train. Ernest was very self-possessed.
|
||
His manners on leaving Beulah were those of an equal, parting from a
|
||
very old and jolly friend. The walk to the station gave me a sudden
|
||
realization how very badly the world was adapted to the needs of
|
||
little boys. Its measurements, its times, its lengths and its breadths
|
||
were grotesquely exaggerated. Ernest ploughed manfully along, but I
|
||
could feel the tug at my hand. Time would have to double itself for
|
||
him to reach the station in the allotted minutes. His legs were going
|
||
in great strides like those of the giant in seven-league boots, and
|
||
he was panting a little. I was cruel, and yet there was the train. I
|
||
felt myself a symbol of parenthood, earth-adjusted, fixed on an adult
|
||
goal, dragging little children panting through a world not their own.
|
||
“I’m ti-yerd!” said Ernest in so plaintive a voice that my heart smote
|
||
me. Nameless premonitions of what might ensue to Ernest from being
|
||
ti-yerd came upon me. I felt a vague dread of having already made
|
||
Ernest an invalid for life. But my adulthood must have triumphed, for
|
||
the train was caught. Ernest’s spirits revived on the reappearance of
|
||
the lemon-drops. And my heart leaped to hear him say that only his
|
||
legs were ti-yerd, and that now they were no longer so. The world had
|
||
diminished again to his size.
|
||
Ernest ate his supper in great contentment at a little table by my
|
||
fireplace. The unaccustomed task of cooking it gave me new and vivid
|
||
thrills. And the intellectual concentration involved in heating soup
|
||
and making toast was so great as to lose me the pleasure of watching
|
||
Ernest draw. I had asked him in the morning if he liked to draw. He had
|
||
answered in such scorn that I had hastily called in Michelangelo. Now
|
||
I placed a pencil and many large sheets of paper negligently near him.
|
||
When I brought him his supper, he had covered them all with futuristic
|
||
men, houses, and horses. The floor was strewn with his work, and he
|
||
was magnificently casting it from him as he attacked these æsthetic
|
||
problems with fierce gusto. Only the sight of food quelled his artistic
|
||
rage. After supper, however, he did not return to them. Instead, he
|
||
became fascinated with the pillows of my couch, and piled them in a
|
||
line, with a whistling and shouting as of railroad trains. I wrote a
|
||
little, merely to show myself that this business of parenthood need
|
||
not devastate one’s life. But I found myself wondering acutely, in the
|
||
midst of an eloquent sentence, what time it was healthy for Ernest
|
||
to go to bed. I seemed to remember seven--incredible to me, and yet
|
||
perhaps meet for a child. It was already seven, but the vigor with
|
||
which he rejected my proposal startled me. His amiability all day had
|
||
been so irreproachable that I did not wish to strain it now. Yet I was
|
||
conscious of an approaching parental crisis. Suppose he did not want to
|
||
go to bed at all!
|
||
When I next looked up, I found that he had compromised by falling
|
||
asleep in a curious diagonal and perilous position across his
|
||
pillows--the trainman asleep at the switch. In a position in which
|
||
nobody could sleep, Ernest slept with the face of an angel. Complexity!
|
||
Only a brute would wake him. Yet how did parents get their children to
|
||
bed? And then I thought of the intricacies of his clothes. I touched
|
||
him very gently; he jumped at me in a dazed way, with the quaintest,
|
||
“Oh, I don’t know what made me go to sleep!” and was off into the big
|
||
chair and helpless slumber.
|
||
I repented of my brutality. I tried to read, but my parental conscience
|
||
again smote me. Ernest looked forlorn and maladjusted, his head
|
||
sinking down on his breast. I thought that Ernest would thank me now
|
||
for reminding him of his bed. He showed astonishing force of will.
|
||
I recoiled from the “I don’t want to go to bed!” which he hurled at
|
||
me. I tried reason. I called his attention to his uncomfortableness.
|
||
But he was unmoved, and insisted on going to sleep again after every
|
||
question. I hardened my heart a little. I saw that stern measures would
|
||
have to be adopted, Ernest’s little clothes taken off, Ernest inserted
|
||
into his flannel nightgown, and tucked into bed. Yet I had no idea
|
||
of the parental technique for such situations. Ernest had been quite
|
||
irresponsive to my appeal that all good little boys went to bed at
|
||
seven o’clock, and I could think of no further generalizations. Crisis
|
||
after so happy a day! Was this parenthood?
|
||
The variety of buttons and hooks on Ernest’s outer and inner garments
|
||
bewildered me. Ernest’s dead sleepiness made the work difficult. But
|
||
finally his little body emerged from the midst, leaving me with the
|
||
feeling of one who has taken a watch apart and wonders dismayedly how
|
||
he will ever get it together again. Ernest, however, was not inclined
|
||
to permit the indignity of this disrobing without bitter protest. When
|
||
I urged his coöperation in putting on his nightgown, he became voluble.
|
||
The sunniness of his temper was clouded. His tone turned to harsh
|
||
bitterness. Little angry tears rolled down his cheeks, and he betrayed
|
||
his sense of extreme outrage with an “I don’t _want_ to put on my
|
||
nightgown!” hurled at me with so much of moral pain that I was chilled.
|
||
But it was too late. I could not unscramble Ernest. With a sinking
|
||
heart I had gently to thrust his little arms and legs into the warm
|
||
flannel, trundle him over the floor, bitter and sleepily protesting,
|
||
roll him into his bed, and cover him up. As he curled and snuggled into
|
||
the covers his tears dried as if by magic, the bitterness smoothed out
|
||
of his face, and all his griefs were forgotten.
|
||
In the next room I sat and read, a pleasant warmth of parental
|
||
protection in my heart. And then Ernest began to cough. It was no light
|
||
childish spasm, but a deep racking cough that froze my blood. There
|
||
had been a little cold in him when he came. I had taken him out into
|
||
the raw December air. I had overexerted him in my thoughtless haste.
|
||
Visions of a delirious and pneumonic child floated before me. Or what
|
||
was that dreadful thing called croup? I could not keep my thought on
|
||
my book. That racking cough came again and again. Ernest must be awake
|
||
and tossing feverishly. Yet when I looked in at him, he would be lying
|
||
peaceful and rosy, and the cough that tore him did not disturb his
|
||
slumbers. He must then be in a state of fatigue so extreme that even
|
||
the cough could not wake him. I reproached myself for dragging him
|
||
into the cold. How could I have led him on so long a journey, and let
|
||
him play with a strenuousness such as his days never knew! I foresaw
|
||
a lurid to-morrow: Ernest sick, myself helpless and ignorant, guilty
|
||
of a negligence that might be fatal. And as I watched him, he began to
|
||
show the most alarming tendency to fall out of bed. I did not dare to
|
||
move him, and yet his head moved ever more perilously near the edge. I
|
||
relied on a chair pushed close to the bed to save him. But I felt weary
|
||
and worn. What an exacting life, the parent’s! Could it be that every
|
||
evening provided such anxieties and problems and thrills? Could one let
|
||
one’s life become so engrossed?
|
||
And then I remembered how every evening, when we went to bed, we
|
||
used to ask our mother if she was going to be home that evening, and
|
||
with what thankful security we sank back, knowing that we should be
|
||
protected through another night. Ernest had not seemed to care what
|
||
became of me. Having had no home and no parents, he had grown up into
|
||
a manly robustness. He did not ask what you were going to do with him.
|
||
He was all for the moment. He took the cash and let the credit go. It
|
||
was I who felt the panic and the insecurity. I envied Ernest. I saw
|
||
that contrary to popular mythology, there were advantages in being an
|
||
institutional orphan, provided you had been properly Binet-ed as of
|
||
normal intelligence and the State got you a decent boarding-mother.
|
||
How much bringing up Ernest had escaped! If his manners were not
|
||
polished, at least they were not uncouth. He had been a little shy
|
||
at first, nodding at questions with a smile, and throwing his head
|
||
against the chair. But there was nothing repressed about him, nothing
|
||
institutionalized, and certainly nothing artificial.
|
||
His cough grew lighter, and as I looked at his yellow hair and the
|
||
angelic flush of his round cheeks, I thought of the horrid little
|
||
puppets that had been produced around me in conventional homes,
|
||
under model fathers and kind and devout mothers. How their fears and
|
||
inhibitions contrasted with Ernest’s directness! His bitter mood
|
||
at going to bed had a certain fine quality about it. I recalled
|
||
the _camaraderie_ we had established. The box of lemon-drops, only
|
||
half-exhausted, stared at me from the pocket of his little sweater. I
|
||
became proud of Ernest. I was enjoying again my vicarious parenthood.
|
||
What did that obscure and tangled heredity of his, or his most
|
||
problematical of futures, matter to him or to me? It was delightful
|
||
to adopt him thus imaginatively. If he turned out badly, could you
|
||
not ascribe it to his heredity, and if well, to your kindly nurture
|
||
and constant wisdom? Nothing else could be very much thought about,
|
||
perhaps, but for the moment Ernest seemed supremely worth thinking
|
||
about. There would be his education. And suddenly it seemed that I did
|
||
not know very much about educating a child. It would be too absorbing.
|
||
There would be no time for the making of a living. Ernest loomed before
|
||
my imagination in the guise of a pleasant peril.
|
||
And then morning came. As soon as it was light Ernest could be
|
||
heard talking and chuckling to himself, with no hint of delirium or
|
||
pneumonia, or the bogies of the night. When I spoke he came running in
|
||
in his bare feet, and crawled in with me. He told me that in spite of
|
||
my valiant chair he had really fallen out of bed. He did not care, and
|
||
proceeded to jump over me in a vigorous acrobatic way. He did not even
|
||
cough, and I wondered if all the little sinister things of childhood
|
||
passed so easily with the night. It was impossible to remember my fears
|
||
as he tossed and shouted, the perfection of healthiness. Parenthood now
|
||
seemed almost too easy to bother with.
|
||
Ernest caught sight of my dollar watch on the chair, and I saw that he
|
||
conceived a fatal and instantaneous passion. He listened to its tick,
|
||
shook it, ogled it amorously. He made little suggestive remarks about
|
||
liking it. I teased him with the fact that he could not tell time.
|
||
Ernest snorted at first in good-natured contempt at the artificial
|
||
rigidity of the process, but finally allowed himself to be persuaded
|
||
that I was not fooling him. And my heart swelled with the generosity
|
||
which I was about to practise in presenting him with this wonderful
|
||
watch.
|
||
But it suddenly became time to dress, for my parental day was to end
|
||
at nine. And then I discovered that it was as hard to get Ernest into
|
||
his clothes as it was to get him out of them. It was intolerable to
|
||
him that he should leave his romp and the watch, and he shouted a No
|
||
to my every suggestion. A new parental crisis crashed upon me. What a
|
||
life of ingenuity and stratagem the parent had to lead! To spend half
|
||
one’s evening persuading a sleepy and bitter little boy to take off his
|
||
clothes, and half the morning in persuading a vivid and jubilant little
|
||
boy to put them on again--this was a life that taxed one’s personal
|
||
resources to the utmost. I reasoned with Ernest. I pointed out that
|
||
his kind friend was coming very soon, and that he must be ready. But
|
||
Ernest was obdurate. He would not even bathe. I pointed out the almost
|
||
universal practice of the human race of clothing themselves during
|
||
the early morning hours. Historic generalizations had no more effect
|
||
on Ernest in the morning than they had had in the evening. And with
|
||
a sudden stab I thought of the watch. That watch I knew would be an
|
||
Aladdin’s lamp to make Ernest my obedient slave. I had only to bribe
|
||
him with it, and he would bathe, dress, or do anything which I told him
|
||
to do. Here was the easy art of corruption by which parents got moral
|
||
clutches on their children! And I deliberately renounced it. I would
|
||
not bribe Ernest. Yet the mischief was done. So intuitive was his mind
|
||
that I felt guiltily that he already knew my readiness to give him the
|
||
watch if he would only dress. In that case, I should miss my moral
|
||
victory. I could not disappoint him, and I did not want to bribe him
|
||
inadvertently.
|
||
There was another consideration which dismayed me. Even if Ernest
|
||
should prove amenable to reason or corruption, where was my ability to
|
||
reconstruct him? Unbuttoning a sleepy and scarcely resisting little
|
||
boy in the evening was quite different from constructively buttoning
|
||
a jumping and hilarious one in the morning. And time was flowing
|
||
dangerously on. Only a sudden theory of self-activity saved me. Could
|
||
Ernest perhaps dress himself? I caught him in one of his tumbles and
|
||
asked him. His mind was too full of excitement, to be working on
|
||
prosaic themes. And then I shot my bolt. “I don’t believe you know how
|
||
to dress yourself, do you?” To that challenge Ernest rose. “Hurry!” I
|
||
said, “and see how quickly you can dress. See if you can dress before
|
||
I can!” Ernest flew into the other room, and in an incredibly short
|
||
time appeared quite constructed except as to an occasional rear-button,
|
||
washed and shining, self-reliant, ready for the business of the day. I
|
||
glowed with the success of my parental generalship. I felt a sense of
|
||
power. But power gained in so adroit and harmless a way was safe. What
|
||
a parent I would make! How grateful I was to Ernest to be leaving me at
|
||
this height!
|
||
I gave him the watch. Though he had longed, the fulfillment of his
|
||
desire struck him with incredulity. The event awed him. But I showed
|
||
him how to wind it, and seemed so indifferent to its fate that he
|
||
was reassured as to my sincerity. He recovered his poise. He sang as
|
||
he ate his breakfast. And when his guide and friend came, amused and
|
||
curious, he went off with her as unreluctantly as he had come, proud
|
||
and self-possessed, the master of himself. He strutted a little with
|
||
his watch, and he politely admitted that he had had a good time.
|
||
I do not know whether Ernest ever thought of me again. He had been an
|
||
unconscious artist, for he had painted many new impressions on my soul.
|
||
He had been sent to me to test my theories of parenthood, but he had
|
||
driven away all thought of theory in the obsession of his demands. How
|
||
could I let him go so cheerily out of my door? It wasn’t at all because
|
||
I minded having my time absorbed, for I like people to absorb my time.
|
||
Why did I not cling to him, buy him from his protector, with a “Dear
|
||
boy, you shall never leave my pleasant rooms again”? Why did I not rush
|
||
after him down the street, stung by a belated remorse? I was conscious
|
||
enough that I was missing all the dramatic climax of the situation. I
|
||
was not acting at all as one does with tempting little orphan boys.
|
||
But that is the way life works. The heart fails, and the vast and
|
||
incalculable sea of responsibility drowns one in doubt. I let him go
|
||
with no more real hesitation than that with which he went.
|
||
The later life of Ernest I feel will be one of sturdy self-reliance.
|
||
That all the aspects of his many-sided character did not become
|
||
apparent in the short time that I held him was clear from the report I
|
||
heard of a Christmas party to which he was invited a few weeks later.
|
||
Ernest, it seems, had broken loose with the fervor of a modern Europe
|
||
after its forty years of peace. He had seized chocolate cake, slapped
|
||
little girls, bitten the hand of the kind lady who fed him, and ended
|
||
by lying down on the floor and yelling in a self-reliant rage. Was this
|
||
the effect of a day with me? Or had I charmed and soothed him? I had a
|
||
pleasant shudder of power, wondering at my influence over him.
|
||
The next I heard of Ernest was his departure for the home of an
|
||
adopting family in New Jersey, from which he was presently to be
|
||
shipped back for offenses unknown. My respect for Ernest rose even
|
||
higher. He would not fit in easily to any smug conventional family
|
||
life. He would not rest adopted until he was satisfied. I began to
|
||
wonder if, after all, we were not affinities. He had kept the peace
|
||
with me, he had derived stimulation from my society. Should I not have
|
||
called him back? Shall I not now? Shall I not want to see him with me
|
||
again? I wonder.
|
||
Graham Wallas, in his “Great Society,” wrote few more interesting
|
||
sentences than that in which he remarked the paucity of genuine
|
||
discussion around him, the lack of skill in meeting each others’ minds
|
||
which Englishmen show when they talk together. Particularly in this
|
||
country where mere talk is always contrasted unfavorably with action
|
||
is discussion rare. The only way we can justify our substitution of
|
||
talking for acting is to talk badly. And we like to talk badly. To put
|
||
into talk the deliberate effort which action demands would seem an
|
||
insufferable pedantry. Talk is one of the few unspecialized talents
|
||
still left in a mechanical world. The plain man resents any invasion
|
||
of this last preserve of freedom. He resents the demand that skill and
|
||
effort be put to work in raising talk into real discussion where points
|
||
are met and presuppositions are clarified and formulations made. So
|
||
conversation is left to grow wild as a common flower along the wayside
|
||
of our personal contacts.
|
||
Yet this lack of art in discussion is not really due to lack of desire.
|
||
An inner need drives talk into something more formal. Discussion is
|
||
popular, and because it is popular it needs, in spite of the plain man,
|
||
a certain deliberate technique. One often stumbles on groups which have
|
||
met not because some problem has seized them all and will not let them
|
||
go until it is satisfied, but because they have felt a general craving
|
||
for talk. They find that their mental wheels will not rotate without
|
||
some corn to grind. In the revelation of what each person thinks it
|
||
important to discuss, one gets the attitude of his mind and the color
|
||
of his governing philosophy. Such a group is a kind of kindergarten
|
||
of discussion. Ostensibly equal and sympathetic in background and
|
||
approach, they show in very little time the startling diversity of
|
||
their actual equipment and mental framework. A score of people all
|
||
doing apparently the same quality of work in the professional world,
|
||
all enjoying a popular reputation, all backed by a college education,
|
||
all reacting constantly to each other in the intersecting world of
|
||
journalism, art, teaching, law, will often be found to show a lack
|
||
of mental sympathy so profound that one wonders how such people can
|
||
smilingly continue to seem to be living in the same world. They are
|
||
using the same words, but they are not using the same meanings, and
|
||
because they are not conscious that it is really meanings which they
|
||
should be exchanging, the discussion is apt to lose itself feebly as
|
||
in desert sands. What really emerges from most discussions, you find,
|
||
is an astonishing array of philosophical skeletons-in-the-closet which
|
||
stalk about the room unchallenged. Their owners are quite unconscious
|
||
of this fatal escape. Yet it takes little wit to discover rigid
|
||
platonists discoursing with pragmatists, minds whose first operation in
|
||
thinking is always to fix a moral judgment contending with remorseless
|
||
realists. Ideals are discussed when one man means by an ideal a
|
||
measuring-stick for human conduct, another a social goal towards
|
||
which he works. Concepts emerge which to half the company represent
|
||
a mental vacuum, and to the other half imply a warm blow of virtue.
|
||
World-philosophies which might be recognized are shabbily ignored. The
|
||
feeble sparring of their distorted shadows is taken for discussion, and
|
||
the company separates with a vague feeling of having occupied itself
|
||
for an evening with something profitably mental.
|
||
All the time, however, it is these fundamental philosophies which
|
||
are the real antagonists, and not the concrete ideas which are the
|
||
subjects of discussion. A good discussion passes rapidly into an
|
||
examination of those presuppositions. It is more interested in charting
|
||
out the minds of the other talkers than in winning small victories or
|
||
getting agreements. Good discussion is a kind of detective uncovering
|
||
the hidden categories and secret springs of emotion that underlie
|
||
“opinions” on things. It seeks that common background and store of
|
||
meanings in which alone diverse opinions can really meet and operate.
|
||
We can no longer tolerate reasons which are only retrospective props
|
||
for action that was really impulsive in its origin. No more should
|
||
we tolerate in discussion that stubborn voicing of attitudes which
|
||
seem axiomatic to the speaker only because he has never examined the
|
||
structure of his own thought. It is popular nowadays to welcome the
|
||
expression of every new attitude. But a discussion should be tolerant
|
||
and hospitable only after the ground has been cleared. You must be
|
||
very sure that what you have to deal with is a real attitude and not
|
||
a counterfeit. Discussion remains mere talk if it remains content
|
||
with the expression of an “opinion” and does not put the expressor
|
||
to immediate cross-examination to discover in the name of what
|
||
Weltanschauung the opinion came.
|
||
Discussion should be one of the most important things in the world, for
|
||
it is almost our only arena of thinking. It is here that all the jumble
|
||
of ideas and impressions that we get from reading and watching are
|
||
dramatically placed in conflict. Here only is there a genuine challenge
|
||
to put them into some sort of order. Without discussion intellectual
|
||
experience is only an exercise in a private gymnasium. It has never
|
||
been put to the test, never had to give an account of itself. It is
|
||
some such motive that impels people to discussion; though they are
|
||
too often content with the jousting of pasteboard knights. But a good
|
||
discussion is not only a conflict. It is fundamentally a coöperation.
|
||
It progresses towards some common understanding. This does not mean
|
||
that it must end in agreement. A discussion will have been adequate if
|
||
it has done no more than set the problem in its significant terms, or
|
||
even defined the purpose that makes such a setting significant. You
|
||
turn up things in your mind that would have remained buried without the
|
||
incision of some new idea. The effort to say exactly what you mean,
|
||
sharpening your idea to the point that will drive home to others, is
|
||
itself invigorating. A good discussion tones up your mind, concentrates
|
||
its loose particles, gives form and direction. When all say exactly
|
||
what they mean, then for the first time understanding--the goal of
|
||
discussion--is possible.
|
||
Discussion demands a mutual trustfulness, a mutual candor. But this
|
||
very trustfulness makes discussion vulnerable. It is particularly open
|
||
to the attack of the person who sees in the group a forum. The physical
|
||
signs of such a misinterpretation are familiar. The eye becomes
|
||
slightly dilated, the voice more orotund. The suggestion develops
|
||
into an exposition, the exposition into an apologia or recrimination.
|
||
Discussion is slain. Another enemy is the person who sidetracks a
|
||
sentence and then proceeds in a leisurely way to unload its freight
|
||
into his own wagon. But in a good discussion the traffic is kept
|
||
constantly moving in both directions along a rather rigid line of
|
||
track, and the freight arrives somewhere. Some people have a fatal gift
|
||
of derailment. Wit is perhaps the most common means. Discussion has no
|
||
greater enemies than those who can catch an idea and touch it off into
|
||
a puff of smoke. Wit should salt a discussion but not explode it.
|
||
Good discussion is so important that those who set about it may be
|
||
rather pedantic and self-conscious in their enterprise. One may acutely
|
||
realize himself as being, for the time, primarily a mind. He renounces
|
||
the seeming of personal advantage in an argument. He sincerely and
|
||
anxiously searches his intellectual stores in order to set down exactly
|
||
what he thinks in just the proportions and colors that he thinks it. He
|
||
studies what the others say, and tries to detect quickly the search for
|
||
advantage or the loose use of terminology. He insists that words and
|
||
phrases have meanings, and if they carry no meaning to him, he searches
|
||
indefatigably until he has found the word that does carry over the full
|
||
freight of significance intended.
|
||
The rewards for such pedantry are found in a tone of clear thinking.
|
||
A good discussion increases the dimensions of every one who takes
|
||
part. Being rather self-consciously a mind in a group of minds means
|
||
becoming more of a person. Ideas are stale things until they are
|
||
personally dramatized. The only good writers of opinion are those who
|
||
instinctively reproduce the atmosphere of discussion, whose sentences
|
||
have the tone of discussion with themselves or with an imagined group.
|
||
The impulse for discussion is an impulse towards the only environment
|
||
where creative thinking can be done. All the more reason why an
|
||
instinct for workmanship should come in to insure that thought does not
|
||
lose itself in feeble sparring or detached monologue.
|
||
THE PURITAN’S WILL TO POWER
|
||
To the modern young person who tries to live well there is no type so
|
||
devastating and harassing as the puritan. We cannot get away from him.
|
||
In his sight we always live. We finish with justifying our new paganism
|
||
against him, but we never quite lose consciousness of his presence.
|
||
Even Theodore Dreiser, who has always revolted from the puritan clutch,
|
||
finds it necessary now and then to tilt a lance against him. If there
|
||
were no puritans we should have to invent them. And if the pagan Mr.
|
||
Dreiser has to keep on through life fighting puritans, how much more
|
||
intrigued must we be who are only reformed puritans, and feel old
|
||
dangers stirring at every aggressive gesture of righteousness? For the
|
||
puritan is the most stable and persistent of types. It is scarcely a
|
||
question of a puritanical age and a pagan age. It is only a question of
|
||
more puritans or less puritans. Even the most emancipated generation
|
||
will find that it has only broken its puritanism up into compartments,
|
||
and balances sexual freedom--or better, perhaps, a pious belief in
|
||
sexual freedom--with a cult of efficiency and personal integrity which
|
||
is far more coercive than the most sumptuary of laws. Young people who
|
||
have given up all thought of “being good” anxiously celebrate a cult of
|
||
“making good.” And a superstition like eugenics threatens to terrorize
|
||
the new intelligentsia.
|
||
Every new generation, in fact, contrives to find some new way of being
|
||
puritanical. Every new generation finds some new way of sacrifice.
|
||
Every new triumphant assertion of life is counter-balanced by some new
|
||
denial. In Europe this most proud and lusty young generation goes to
|
||
its million-headed slaughter, and in America the social consciousness
|
||
arises to bewilder and deflect the _essor_ towards life. Just when
|
||
convention seemed to be on the run, and youth seemed to be facing a
|
||
sane and candid attitude towards sex, we find idealistic girls and men
|
||
coming out of the colleges to tell us of our social responsibility to
|
||
the race. This means not only that our daily living is to be dampened
|
||
by the haunting thought of misery that we cannot personally prevent,
|
||
but that our thirst towards love-experience is to be discouraged and
|
||
turned aside into a concern for racial perfection. That is, we are
|
||
subtly persuaded against merely growing widely and loving intensely. We
|
||
become vague and mystified means toward nebulous and unreal ends. This
|
||
new puritanism will not let us be ends in ourselves, or let personality
|
||
be the chief value in life. It will almost let us sometimes. But it
|
||
always pulls us up somewhere. There is always a devil of inhibition to
|
||
interpose before our clean and naïve grasping of life. (You see, my
|
||
puritanism takes the form of a suspicion that there may be a personal
|
||
devil lurking in the universe.)
|
||
This is why the puritan always needs to be thoroughly explained and
|
||
exposed. We must keep him before our eyes, recognize him as the real
|
||
enemy, no matter in what ideal disguise he lurks. We must learn how he
|
||
works, and what peculiar satisfactions he gets from his activity. For
|
||
he must get satisfaction or he would not be so prevalent. I accept the
|
||
dogma that to explain anybody we have to do little more than discover
|
||
just what contentment people are getting from what they do, or from
|
||
what they are permitting to happen to them, or even from what they are
|
||
flinging their will into trying to prevent happening to them. For, if
|
||
life is anything positive, it is the sense of control. In the puritan,
|
||
of course, we have the paradox how he can get satisfaction from
|
||
ruggedly and sternly subjecting himself and renouncing the world, the
|
||
flesh and the devil. There is a popular superstition that the puritan
|
||
has an extra endowment of moral force, that he reverses the natural
|
||
current of life, that he resists the drag of carnality down towards
|
||
hell, that his energy is thrown contra-satisfaction, that this control
|
||
is a real straddling of the nefarious way. But, of course, it is just
|
||
this superstition that gives the puritan his terrific prestige. In the
|
||
light of the will-to-power dogma this superstition fades. The puritan
|
||
becomes just as much of a naturalistic phenomenon as the most carnal
|
||
sinner. Instincts and impulses, in the puritan, are not miraculously
|
||
cancelled, but have their full play. The primitive currents of life are
|
||
not blocked and turned back on their sources, but turned into powerful
|
||
and usually devastating channels. The puritan is just as much of a
|
||
“natural” man as you or I.
|
||
But we still have to explain how this lustful, headstrong creature
|
||
called man, spilling with greed, could so unabatedly throughout the
|
||
ages give up the primitive satisfaction of sex and food and drink and
|
||
gregariousness and act the ascetic and the glumly censorious. How could
|
||
an animal whose business was to feel powerful get power from being in
|
||
subjection and deprivation? Well, the puritan gets his sense of power
|
||
from a very cunningly organized satisfaction of two of his strongest
|
||
impulses,--the self-conscious personal impulses of being regarded and
|
||
being neglected. The puritan is no thwarted and depleted person. On the
|
||
contrary, he is rather a complete person, getting almost the maximum of
|
||
satisfaction out of these two apparently contradictory sentiments,--the
|
||
self-regarding and self-abasing. The pure autocrat would feed himself
|
||
wholly on the first, the pure slave would be only a human embodiment
|
||
of the second. But the pure puritan manages to make the most powerful
|
||
amalgam of both.
|
||
What we may call the puritan process starts with the satisfaction of
|
||
the impulse for self-abasement (an impulse as primitive as any, for
|
||
in the long struggle for survival it was often just as necessary for
|
||
life to cower as it was to fight). It is only the puritan’s prestige
|
||
that has attached moral value to self-sacrifice, for there is nothing
|
||
intrinsic in it that makes it any more praiseworthy than lust. But
|
||
its pragmatic value is immense. When the puritan announces himself
|
||
as the least worthy of men, he not only predisposes in his favor the
|
||
naturally slavish people around him, but he neutralizes the aggressive
|
||
and self-regarding who would otherwise be moved to suppress him. He
|
||
renounces, he puts on meekness, he sternly regiments himself, he makes
|
||
himself unhappy in ways that are just not quite severe enough to
|
||
excite pity and yet run no risk of arousing any envy. If the puritan
|
||
does all this unconsciously, the effect is yet the same as if he were
|
||
deliberately plotting. To give his impulses of self-abasement full
|
||
play, he must, of course, exercise a certain degree of control. This
|
||
control, however, gives him little of that sense of power that makes
|
||
for happiness. Puritan moralists have always tried to make us believe
|
||
in this virtue of self-control. They forget to point out, however, that
|
||
it does not become a virtue until it has become idealized. Control over
|
||
self gives us little sense of control. It is the dreariest of all
|
||
satisfactions of the will to power. Not until we become _proud_ of our
|
||
self-control do we get satisfaction. The puritan only begins to reap
|
||
his satisfaction when the self-regarding impulse comes into play.
|
||
Having given his self-abasing impulse free rein, he is now in a
|
||
position to exploit his self-regard. He has made himself right with
|
||
the weak and slavish. He has fortified himself with their alliance.
|
||
He now satisfies his self-regard by becoming proud of his humility
|
||
and enjoining it on others. If it were self-control alone that made
|
||
the puritan, he would not be as powerful as he is. Indeed he would
|
||
be no more than the mild ascetic, who is all abnegation because his
|
||
self-regarding mechanism is weak. But in the puritan both impulses are
|
||
strong. It is control over others that yields him his satisfactions
|
||
of power. He may stamp out his sex-desire, but his impulse to shatter
|
||
ideas that he does not like will flourish wild and wanton. To the true
|
||
puritan the beauty of unselfishness lies in his being able to enforce
|
||
it on others. He loves virtue not so much for its own sake as for its
|
||
being an instrument of his terrorism.
|
||
The true puritan is at once the most unselfish and the most
|
||
self-righteous of men. There is nothing he will not do for you, give
|
||
up for you, suffer for you. But at the same time there is no cranny
|
||
of your world that he will not illuminate with the virtue of this
|
||
doing of his. His real satisfaction comes not from his action of
|
||
benevolence but from the moral of the tale. He need not boast about his
|
||
renunciation or his altruism. But in any true puritan atmosphere that
|
||
pride will be prevalent. Indeed, it is the oxygen of that atmosphere.
|
||
Wherever you come across that combination of selfless devotion with
|
||
self-righteousness, you have the essence of the puritan. Should you
|
||
come across the one without the other you would find not the puritan
|
||
but the saint.
|
||
The puritan then gets the satisfaction of his will to power through
|
||
the turning of his self-abasement into purposes of self-regard.
|
||
Renunciation is the raw material for his positive sense of power. The
|
||
puritan gets his satisfaction exactly where the most carnal of natural
|
||
men gets his, out of the stimulation of his pride. And in a world
|
||
where renunciation has to happen to us whether we want it or not, the
|
||
puritan is in the most impressive strategic position. In economy of
|
||
energy he has it all over the head that is bloody but unbowed. For
|
||
the puritan is so efficient morally that he can bow his head and yet
|
||
exact control both out of the bowing and out of the prestige which his
|
||
bowing gives him, as well as out of the bowing which he can enforce on
|
||
others. The true puritan must become an evangelist. It is not enough
|
||
to renounce the stimulus to satisfaction which is technically known as
|
||
a “temptation.” The renouncing must be made into an ideal, the ideal
|
||
must be codified, promulgated, and, in the last analysis, enforced.
|
||
In the compelling of others to abstain, you have the final glut of
|
||
puritanical power. For in getting other people to renounce a thing
|
||
you thereby get renewed justification for your own renouncing. And
|
||
so the puritan may go on inexhaustibly rolling up his satisfactions,
|
||
one impulse reinforcing the other. The simultaneous play of these two
|
||
apparently inconsistent personal impulses makes the puritan type one of
|
||
the stablest in society. While the rest of us are longing for power the
|
||
puritan is enjoying his. And because the puritan is so well integrated
|
||
he almost always rules. The person whose satisfactions of control are
|
||
more various and more refined is on the defensive against him.
|
||
The puritan gets his sense of power not in the harmless way of the
|
||
artist or the philosopher or the lover or the scientist, but in a
|
||
crude assault on that most vulnerable part of other people’s souls,
|
||
their moral sense. He is far more dangerous to those he converts than
|
||
to those he intimidates. For he first scares them into abandoning the
|
||
rich and sensuous and expressive impulses in life, and then teaches
|
||
them to be proud of having done so. We all have the potentiality of
|
||
the puritan within us. I remember suffering agonies at the age of ten
|
||
because my aunt used to bring me candy that had been wickedly purchased
|
||
on the Sabbath day. I forget whether I ate it or not, but that fact is
|
||
irrelevant. What counted was the guilt with which the whole universe
|
||
seemed to be stained. I need no other evidence of the irrational nature
|
||
of morality than this fact that children can be such dogged little
|
||
puritans, can be at the age of ten so sternly and intuitively righteous.
|
||
The puritan is a case of arrested development. Most of us do grow
|
||
beyond him and find subtler ways of satisfying our desire for
|
||
power. And we do it because we never can quite take that step from
|
||
self-abasement to self-regard. We never can quite become proud of our
|
||
humility. Renunciation remains an actual going without, sacrifice a
|
||
real thwarting. If we value an experience and deliberately surrender
|
||
it, we are too naïve to pretend that there are compensations. There
|
||
is a loss. We are left with a vacuum. There _is_ only depression and
|
||
loss of control. Our self-regard is not quite elemental enough to get
|
||
stimulation from wielding virtue over others. I never feel so degraded
|
||
as when I have renounced. I had rather beat my head rhythmically and
|
||
endlessly against an unyielding wall. For the pagan often breaks
|
||
miraculously through the wall. But the puritan at his best can only
|
||
strut outside.
|
||
Most of us, therefore, after we have had our puritan fling, sown our
|
||
puritan wild oats as it were, grow up into devout and progressing
|
||
pagans, cultivating the warmth of the sun, the deliciousness of
|
||
love-experience, the high moods of art. The puritans remain around us,
|
||
a danger and a threat. But they have value to us in keeping us acutely
|
||
self-conscious of our faith. They whet our ardor. Perhaps no one can be
|
||
really a good appreciating pagan who has not once been a bad puritan.
|
||
It is impossible not to think of Dostoevsky as a living author when
|
||
his books come regularly, as they are coming, to the American public
|
||
every few months. Our grandfathers sixty years ago are said to have
|
||
lived their imaginative lives in anticipation of the next instalment
|
||
of Dickens or Thackeray. I can feel somewhat of the same excitement in
|
||
this Dostoevsky stream, though I cannot pretend that the great Russian
|
||
will ever become a popular American classic. Yet in the progress from
|
||
Dickens to Dostoevsky there is a symbol of the widening and deepening
|
||
of the American imagination. We are adrift on a far wider sea than our
|
||
forefathers. We are far more adventurous in personal relations, far
|
||
more aware of the bewildering variousness of human nature. If you have
|
||
once warmed to Dostoevsky, you can never go back to the older classic
|
||
fiction on which we were brought up. The lack of _nuance_, the hideous
|
||
normality of its people begin to depress you. When once you have a
|
||
sense of the illusion of “character,” when once you have felt the
|
||
sinister, irrational turn of human thoughts, and the subtle interplay
|
||
of impression and desire, and the crude impingement of circumstance,
|
||
you find yourself--unless you keep conscious watch--feeling a shade
|
||
of contempt for the Scott and Balzac and Dickens and Thackeray
|
||
and Trollope who were the authoritative showmen of life for our
|
||
middle-class relatives. You relegate such fiction to the level of
|
||
“movie” art, with its clean, pigeon-holed categories of the emotions,
|
||
and its “registering” of a few simple moods.
|
||
You will, of course, be wrong in any such contempt, because these
|
||
novelists show a bewildering variety of types and a deep intuition
|
||
of the major movements of the soul. Dickens teems with irrational
|
||
creatures, with unconventional levels of life. But you can scarcely
|
||
contradict me when I say that neither Dickens nor his readers ever
|
||
forgot that these human patterns were queer. His appeal lies exactly
|
||
in the joyful irrelevance with which we take all these lapses from the
|
||
norm, in the pitiful tears which we can shed for human beings done
|
||
so obviously as they should not be done by. In reading these familiar
|
||
novelists we never lose our moral landmarks. No matter how great the
|
||
deviations a character shows, we are always conscious--or could be
|
||
conscious if we liked--of the exact amount of that deviation. The
|
||
charm of that nineteenth-century fiction, as in the work of belated
|
||
Victorians like Mr. Chesterton, lies in that duality between the
|
||
sane and the insane, the virtuous and the villainous, the sober and
|
||
the mischievous, the responsible and the irresponsible. There is no
|
||
falsification in this. These novelists were writing for an epoch that
|
||
really had stable “character,” standards, morals, that consistently saw
|
||
the world in a duality of body and spirit. They were a reflection of a
|
||
class that really had reticences, altruisms, and religious codes.
|
||
Dostoevsky appeals to us to-day because we are trying to close up that
|
||
dualism. And our appreciation of him and the other modern Russians is
|
||
a mark of how far we have actually gone. It is still common to call
|
||
this fiction unhealthy, morbid, unwholesome. All that is meant by this
|
||
is that the sudden shock of a democratic, unified, intensely the mind
|
||
that thinks in the old dual terms as to be almost revolting. What
|
||
becomes more and more apparent to the readers of Dostoevsky, however,
|
||
is his superb modern healthiness. He is healthy because he has no
|
||
sense of any dividing line between the normal and the abnormal, or
|
||
even between the sane and the insane. I call this healthy because it
|
||
is so particularly salutary for our American imagination to be jolted
|
||
out of its stiltedness and preconceived notions of human psychology.
|
||
I admit that the shock is somewhat rough and rude. “The Idiot”, which
|
||
I have read only once, remains in my mind as a stream of fairly
|
||
incomprehensible people and unintelligible emotional changes. Yet I
|
||
feel that when I read it again I shall understand it. For Dostoevsky
|
||
has a strange, intimate power which breaks in your neat walls and shows
|
||
you how much more subtle and inconsequent your flowing life is than
|
||
even your introspection had thought. But for all his subtlety he is the
|
||
reverse of anything morbidly introspective. In his work you get the
|
||
full warm unity of emotional life without losing any of the detail of
|
||
the understanding analysis of the soul.
|
||
This astounding mergence Dostoevsky actually seems to achieve. That
|
||
is what gives him the intimate power which distinguishes every story
|
||
of his from anything else you have ever read. Again he contrasts with
|
||
the classical novelists. For they are quite palpably outside their
|
||
subjects. You are never unaware of the author as telling the story.
|
||
He has always the air of the showman, unrolling his drama before
|
||
your eyes. His characters may be infinitely warm and human, but the
|
||
writer himself is somehow not in them. “Wuthering Heights” is the only
|
||
English story I think of that has something of the fierce, absorbed
|
||
intensity of Dostoevsky. In the great Russian you lose all sense of
|
||
the showman. The writer is himself the story; he is inextricably in
|
||
it. In narratives like “The Double” or “A Gentle Spirit” immanence
|
||
could go no further. The story seems to tell itself. Its strange,
|
||
breathless intimacy of mood follows faithfully every turn and quirk
|
||
of thought and feeling. Its tempo is just of that inner life we know,
|
||
with its ceaseless boring into the anxious future and its trails of
|
||
the unresolved past. These stories follow just that fluctuating line
|
||
of our conscious life with its depressions and satisfactions, its
|
||
striving always for a sense of control, its uneasiness. In Dostoevsky’s
|
||
novels it is not only the author that is immanent. The reader also
|
||
is absorbed. After reading “Crime and Punishment” you are yourself
|
||
the murderer. For days the odor of guilt follows you around. The
|
||
extravaganza of “The Double” pursues you like a vivid dream of your own.
|
||
Such stories, however fantastic the problems of the soul, get deeply
|
||
into us. We cannot ignore them, we cannot take them irresponsibly.
|
||
We cannot read them for amusement, or even in detachment, as we can
|
||
our classics. We forget our categories, our standards, our notions of
|
||
human nature. All we feel is that we are tracing the current of life
|
||
itself. Dostoevsky is so much in his stories that we get no sense
|
||
of his attitude toward his characters or of his criticism of life.
|
||
Yet the after-impression is one of rich kindness, born of suffering
|
||
and imperfection, and of a truly religious reverence for all living
|
||
experience. Man as a being with his feet in the mud and his gaze turned
|
||
toward the stars, yet always indissolubly one in feet and eyes and
|
||
heart and brain! If we are strong enough to hear him, this is the
|
||
decisive force we need on our American creative outlook.
|
||
Theodore Dreiser has had the good fortune to evoke a peculiar quality
|
||
of pugnacious interest among the younger American intelligentsia
|
||
such as has been the lot of almost nobody else writing to-day unless
|
||
it be Miss Amy Lowell. We do not usually take literature seriously
|
||
enough to quarrel over it. Or else we take it so seriously that we
|
||
urbanely avoid squabbles. Certainly there are none of the vendettas
|
||
that rage in a culture like that of France. But Mr. Dreiser seems to
|
||
have made himself, particularly since the suppression of “The Genius,”
|
||
a veritable issue. Interesting and surprising are the reactions to
|
||
him. Edgar Lee Masters makes him a “soul-enrapt demi-urge, walking
|
||
the earth, stalking life”; Harris Merton Lyon saw in him a “seer of
|
||
inscrutable mien”; Arthur Davison Ficke sees him as master of a passing
|
||
throng of figures, “labored with immortal illusion, the terrible and
|
||
beautiful, cruel and wonder-laden illusion of life”; Mr. Powys makes
|
||
him an epic philosopher of the “life-tide”; H. L. Mencken puts him
|
||
ahead of Conrad, with “an agnosticism that has almost passed beyond
|
||
curiosity.” On the other hand, an unhappy critic in _The Nation_ last
|
||
year gave Mr. Dreiser his place for all time in a neat antithesis
|
||
between the realism that was based on a theory of human conduct and the
|
||
naturalism that reduced life to a mere animal behavior. For Dreiser
|
||
this last special hell was reserved, and the jungle-like and simian
|
||
activities of his characters were rather exhaustively outlined. At the
|
||
time this antithesis looked silly. With the appearance of Mr. Dreiser’s
|
||
latest book, “A Hoosier Holiday,” it becomes nonsensical. For that wise
|
||
and delightful book reveals him as a very human critic of very common
|
||
human life, romantically sensual and poetically realistic, with an
|
||
artist’s vision and a thick, warm feeling for American life.
|
||
This book gives the clue to Mr. Dreiser, to his insatiable curiosity
|
||
about people, about their sexual inclinations, about their dreams,
|
||
about the homely qualities that make them American. His memories give a
|
||
picture of the floundering young American that is so typical as to be
|
||
almost epic. No one has ever pictured this lower middle-class American
|
||
life so winningly, because no one has had the necessary literary skill
|
||
with the lack of self-consciousness. Mr. Dreiser is often sentimental,
|
||
but it is a sentimentality that captivates you with its candor. You
|
||
are seeing this vacuous, wistful, spiritually rootless, Middle-Western
|
||
life through the eyes of a naïve but very wise boy. Mr. Dreiser seems
|
||
queer only because he has carried along his youthful attitude in
|
||
unbroken continuity. He is fascinated with sex because youth is usually
|
||
obsessed with sex. He puzzles about the universe because youth usually
|
||
puzzles. He thrills to crudity and violence because sensitive youth
|
||
usually recoils from the savagery of the industrial world. Imagine
|
||
incorrigible, sensuous youth endowed with the brooding skepticism
|
||
of the philosopher who feels the vanity of life, and you have the
|
||
paradox of Mr. Dreiser. For these two attitudes in him support rather
|
||
than oppose each other. His spiritual evolution was out of a pious,
|
||
ascetic atmosphere into intellectual and personal freedom. He seems
|
||
to have found himself without losing himself. Of how many American
|
||
writers can this be said? And for this much shall be forgiven him,--his
|
||
slovenliness of style, his lack of _nuances_, his apathy to the finer
|
||
shades of beauty, his weakness for the mystical and the vague. Mr.
|
||
Dreiser suggests the over-sensitive temperament that protects itself
|
||
by an admiration for crudity and cruelty. His latest book reveals the
|
||
boyhood shyness and timidity of this Don Juan of novelists. Mr. Dreiser
|
||
is complicated, but he is complicated in a very understandable American
|
||
way, the product of the uncouth forces of small-town life and the vast
|
||
disorganization of the wider American world. As he reveals himself, it
|
||
is a revelation of a certain broad level of the American soul.
|
||
Mr. Dreiser seems uncommon only because he is more naïve than most
|
||
of us. It is not so much that his pages swarm with sexful figures
|
||
as that he rescues sex for the scheme of personal life. He feels a
|
||
holy mission to slay the American literary superstition that men and
|
||
women are not sensual beings. But he does not brush this fact in the
|
||
sniggering way of the popular magazines. He takes it very seriously,
|
||
so much so that some of his novels become caricatures of desire. It
|
||
is, however, a misfortune that it has been Brieux and Freud and not
|
||
native Theodore Dreiser who has saturated the sexual imagination of the
|
||
younger American intelligentsia. It would have been far healthier to
|
||
absorb Mr. Dreiser’s literary treatment of sex than to go hysterical
|
||
over its pathology. Sex has little significance unless it is treated
|
||
in personally artistic, novelistic terms. The American tradition had
|
||
tabooed the treatment of those infinite gradations and complexities of
|
||
love that fill the literary imagination of a sensitive people. When
|
||
curiosity became too strong and reticence was repealed in America,
|
||
we had no means of articulating ourselves except in a deplorable
|
||
pseudo-scientific jargon that has no more to do with the relevance
|
||
of sex than the chemical composition of orange paint has to do with
|
||
the artist’s vision. Dreiser has done a real service to the American
|
||
imagination in despising the underworld and going gravely to the
|
||
business of picturing sex as it is lived in the personal relations
|
||
of bungling, wistful, or masterful men and women. He seemed strange
|
||
and rowdy only because he made sex human, and American tradition had
|
||
never made it human. It had only made it either sacred or vulgar, and
|
||
when these categories no longer worked, we fell under the dubious and
|
||
perverting magic of the psycho-analysts.
|
||
In spite of his looseness of literary gait and heaviness of style
|
||
Dreiser seems a sincere groper after beauty. It is natural enough
|
||
that this should so largely be the beauty of sex. For where would a
|
||
sensitive boy, brought up in Indiana and in the big American cities,
|
||
get beauty expressed for him except in women? What does Mid-Western
|
||
America offer to the starving except its personal beauty? A few
|
||
landscapes, an occasional picture in a museum, a book of verse perhaps!
|
||
Would not all the rest be one long, flaunting offense of ugliness and
|
||
depression? “The ‘Genius,’” instead of being that mass of pornographic
|
||
horror which the Vice Societies repute it to be, is the story of a
|
||
groping artist whose love of beauty runs obsessingly upon the charm
|
||
of girlhood. Through different social planes, through business and
|
||
manual labor and the feverish world of artists, he pursues this lure.
|
||
Dreiser is refreshing in his air of the moral democrat, who sees life
|
||
impassively, neither praising nor blaming, at the same time that he
|
||
realizes how much more terrible and beautiful and incalculable life
|
||
is than any of us are willing to admit. It may be all _apologia_, but
|
||
it comes with the grave air of a mind that wants us to understand just
|
||
how it all happened. “Sister Carrie” will always retain the fresh
|
||
charm of a spontaneous working-out of mediocre, and yet elemental and
|
||
significant, lives. A good novelist catches hold of the thread of human
|
||
desire. Dreiser does this, and that is why his admirers forgive him so
|
||
many faults.
|
||
If you like to speculate about personal and literary qualities that are
|
||
specifically American, Dreiser should be as interesting as any one now
|
||
writing in America. This becomes clearer as he writes more about his
|
||
youth. His hopelessly unorientated, half-educated boyhood is so typical
|
||
of the uncritical and careless society in which wistful American talent
|
||
has had to grope. He had to be spiritually a self-made man, work out
|
||
a philosophy of life, discover his own sincerity. Talent in America
|
||
outside of the ruling class flowers very late, because it takes so
|
||
long to find its bearings. It has had almost to create its own soil,
|
||
before it could put in its roots and grow. It is born shivering into
|
||
an inhospitable and irrelevant group. It has to find its own kind of
|
||
people and piece together its links of comprehension. It is a gruelling
|
||
and tedious task, but those who come through it contribute, like Vachel
|
||
Lindsay, creative work that is both novel and indigenous. The process
|
||
can be more easily traced in Dreiser than in almost anybody else. “A
|
||
Hoosier Holiday” not only traces the personal process, but it gives the
|
||
social background. The common life, as seen throughout the countryside,
|
||
is touched off quizzically, and yet sympathetically, with an artist’s
|
||
vision. Dreiser sees the American masses in their commonness and at
|
||
their pleasure as brisk, rather vacuous people, a little pathetic in
|
||
their innocence of the possibilities of life and their optimistic
|
||
trustfulness. He sees them ruled by great barons of industry, and yet
|
||
unconscious of their serfdom. He seems to love this countryside, and he
|
||
makes you love it.
|
||
Dreiser loves, too, the ugly violent bursts of American industry,--the
|
||
flaming steel-mills and gaunt lakesides. “The Titan” and “The
|
||
Financier” are unattractive novels, but they are human documents of the
|
||
brawn of a passing American era. Those stenographic conversations, webs
|
||
of financial intrigue, bare bones of enterprise, insult our artistic
|
||
sense. There is too much raw beef, and yet it all has the taste and
|
||
smell of the primitive business-jungle it deals with. These crude and
|
||
greedy captains of finance with their wars and their amours had to be
|
||
given some kind of literary embodiment, and Dreiser has hammered a sort
|
||
of raw epic out of their lives.
|
||
It is not only his feeling for these themes of crude power and sex and
|
||
the American common life that makes Dreiser interesting. His emphases
|
||
are those of a new America which is latently expressive and which must
|
||
develop its art before we shall really have become articulate. For
|
||
Dreiser is a true hyphenate, a product of that conglomerate Americanism
|
||
that springs from other roots than the English tradition. Do we realize
|
||
how rare it is to find a talent that is thoroughly American and wholly
|
||
un-English? Culturally we have somehow suppressed the hyphenate.
|
||
Only recently has he forced his way through the unofficial literary
|
||
censorship. The vers-librists teem with him, but Dreiser is almost the
|
||
first to achieve a largeness of utterance. His outlook, it is true,
|
||
flouts the American canons of optimism and redemption, but these
|
||
were never anything but conventions. There stirs in Dreiser’s books
|
||
a new American quality. It is not at all German. It is an authentic
|
||
attempt to make something artistic out of the chaotic materials that
|
||
lie around us in American life. Dreiser interests because we can watch
|
||
him grope and feel his clumsiness. He has the artist’s vision without
|
||
the sureness of the artist’s technique. That is one of the tragedies of
|
||
America. But his faults are those of his material and of uncouth bulk,
|
||
and not of shoddiness. He expresses an America that is in process of
|
||
forming. The interest he evokes is part of the eager interest we feel
|
||
in that growth.
|
||
Few people read Newman to-day. The old anxious issues have been drowned
|
||
in a flood of social problems, and that world of liberal progress which
|
||
to him was the enemy at the gates has long ago broken in and carried
|
||
everything before it. Newman’s persuasive voice sounds thin and remote,
|
||
and his ideas smell of a musty age. Yet that title of his, _Apologia
|
||
Pro Vita Sua_, always intrigues one with its modern and subjective
|
||
sound. It is so much what all of us are itching to write. Its egotism
|
||
brushes with a faint irony that absorption in the righteousness most
|
||
emphatically not ourselves with which Newman’s life was mingled. In
|
||
that call upon him to interpret his life, one feels an unquenchable
|
||
ego which carries him over to these shameless and self-centred times.
|
||
Fortunately placed for a week in a theological household, I plunged
|
||
into the slightly forbidding pages of the wistful cardinal. What I
|
||
found in him must be very different from what he found in himself or
|
||
what anybody else found in him at the time. Newman in 1917 suggests
|
||
less a reactionary theology than subtle and secret sympathy with
|
||
certain veins of our modern intellectual radicalism. The voice was
|
||
faint, but what I heard made Newman significant for me. For it implied
|
||
that if faith is eternal, so is skepticism, and that even in the most
|
||
pious mind may be found the healthy poison of doubt.
|
||
Superficially seen, Newman appeared to have abolished doubt. His faith
|
||
was more conservative than that of the orthodox. He surrendered all
|
||
that Victorian life for the narrowest of obscurantisms. The reasons
|
||
he found for his course only riveted him impregnably to the rock of
|
||
unreason. What my mind fastened on, however, was the emotional impulse
|
||
that led him to his tortuous way. One detected there in him that same
|
||
sinister note one feels in Pascal. It is a reasonableness that eats
|
||
away at belief until it finally destroys either it or you. It is an
|
||
uncanny honesty of soul which, struggling utterly for faith, saves it
|
||
only by unconsciously losing it. For if you win your way through to
|
||
belief by sheer intellectual force, you run the risk of over-reaching
|
||
your belief. You do not know that you have passed it, but you have
|
||
really dispensed with its use. If you are honest in mind and religious
|
||
in temperament, you find yourself reduced to the naked reality of
|
||
religion. You are left with only the most primitive mysticism of
|
||
feeling. You are one with the primitive savage group. Ineffable
|
||
feeling, ecstatic union with the universe,--this is your state. The
|
||
more religious you become, the more you tear the fabric of your dogma.
|
||
Belief is only for the irreligious. Intellectuality in religion, under
|
||
the guise of fortifying faith, only destroys its foundations. Newman’s
|
||
approach towards the certitude of dogma was really only an approach
|
||
towards the certitude of mysticism. When he thought he was satisfying
|
||
his intellectual doubts, he was satisfying his emotional cravings.
|
||
Intending to buttress dogma, he only assured for himself the mystic
|
||
state.
|
||
How far he really attained mysticism is a fascinating problem for the
|
||
reader of the _Apologia_. Popular impression is probably right that
|
||
he bore to his incredibly lengthened age a pathos of uneasiness and
|
||
sadness. But popular impression is probably wrong in ascribing this
|
||
to lingering remorse or regret. If there was any uncertainty, it was
|
||
not for having left his Anglican position, but for not having seen the
|
||
thing wholly through. Intellectuality still clung around him like a
|
||
cold swathing garment. He probably never attained that pure mysticism
|
||
which his soul craved. One has the impression that Newman’s pathos lay
|
||
in the fact that he never quite became a saint. The official world
|
||
seemed to hang about him hamperingly. One wonders sometimes if he could
|
||
not almost as easily have become a wan sweet pagan as a saint. The
|
||
tragedy of Pascal was that intrinsically he was a pagan. The kind of
|
||
Christianity to which he drove himself was for him the most virulent
|
||
form of moral suicide. The terrible fascination of his _Pensées_
|
||
lies in that relentless closing in of the divine enemy on his human
|
||
“pride,” which might have been, with his intellectual genius, so lusty
|
||
an organ of creativeness and adventure. It was not disease that killed
|
||
him but Christianity. Pascal is an eternal warning from the perils of
|
||
intellectual religion.
|
||
Dogma did not kill Newman, but it did not save him. He was not a
|
||
pagan, but he never became a saint. He never quite got rid of dogma.
|
||
And that is what so fascinates us in his religious technique. For his
|
||
_Apologia_, is really a subtle exposure of infallibility. It shows us
|
||
what the acute intellectuality of a mystic finds to do with dogma.
|
||
The goal towards which he tends is the utter bankruptcy of articulate
|
||
religion. And involved in it is the bankruptcy of institutional
|
||
religion. It is a religious bankruptcy that acts like modern commercial
|
||
bankruptcy. All material assets are relinquished, and you start again
|
||
in business on the old footing. You throw over your dogma but keep the
|
||
mystic experience, which can never be taken away from you. In this way
|
||
the Catholic Church becomes, or could become, eternal. Newman shows a
|
||
way just short of relinquishment. He uses infallibility to liquidate
|
||
his intellectual debts, and then becomes free of his creditors.
|
||
How these attitudes are implied in the _Apologia_ I can only suggest
|
||
through the surprises that a reading brought. The contention had
|
||
always been that Newman’s apostasy was due to feebleness of will, to
|
||
a fatigue in the search for certitude that let him slip into the arms
|
||
of Mother Church. My Protestant training had persistently represented
|
||
every going over to Rome as a surrender of individual integrity. For
|
||
the sake of intellectual peace, one became content to stultify the
|
||
intellect and leave all thinking to the infallible Church. There
|
||
is nothing of intellectual fatigue, however, in Newman. His course
|
||
did not spring from weariness of thinking. He had a most fluent and
|
||
flexible mind, and if he seemed to accept beliefs at which Protestants
|
||
thrilled with frightened incredulity, it was because such an acceptance
|
||
satisfied some deeper need, some surer craving. Read to-day, Newman
|
||
interests not because of the beliefs but because of this deeper desire.
|
||
He had a sure intuition of the uses of infallibility and intellectual
|
||
authority, and of their place in the scheme of things. This is his
|
||
significance for the modern mind. And he is the only one of the great
|
||
religious writers who seems to reach out to us and make contact with
|
||
our modern attitude.
|
||
Newman loved dogma, but it was not dogma that he loved most. It was
|
||
not to quiet a heart that ached with doubt that he passed from the
|
||
Anglican to the Roman Church. As an Anglican Catholic he was quite as
|
||
sure of his doctrine as he was as a Roman Catholic. His most primitive
|
||
craving was not so much for infallibility as for legitimacy. It was
|
||
because the Roman Church was primitive, legitimate, authorized, and the
|
||
Anglican Church yawned in spots, that he made his reluctant choice.
|
||
His Anglican brothers would not let him show them the catholicity
|
||
of the Articles. They began to act schismatically, and there was
|
||
nothing to do but join the legitimate order and leave them to their
|
||
vulgar insufficiencies. This one gets from the _Apologia_. But this
|
||
craving, one feels, sprang not from cowardice but from a sense of
|
||
proportion. Newman was frankly a conservative. Here was a mind that
|
||
lived in the most exciting of all intellectual eras, when all the
|
||
acuteness of England was passing from orthodoxy to liberalism. Newman
|
||
deliberately went in the other direction. But he went because he
|
||
valued certain personal and spiritual things to which he saw the new
|
||
issues would be either wholly irrelevant or fatally confusing. One
|
||
of the best things in the _Apologia_ is the appendix on Liberalism,
|
||
where Newman, with the clarity of the perfect enemy, sums up the new
|
||
faith. Each proposition outrages some aspect of legitimacy which is
|
||
precious to him, yet his intuition--he wrote it not many years after
|
||
the Reform Bill--has put in classic form what is the Nicene Creed of
|
||
liberal religion. No liberal ever expressed liberalism so justly and
|
||
concisely. Newman understands this modern creed as perfectly as he
|
||
flouts it. So Pascal’s uncanny analysis of human pride led him only to
|
||
self-prostration.
|
||
Why did Newman disdain liberalism? He understood it, and he did not
|
||
like it. His deathless virtue lies in his disconcerting honesty. The
|
||
air was full of strange new cries that he saw would arrest the Church.
|
||
She would have to explain, defend, interpret, on a scale far larger
|
||
than had been done for centuries. She would have to make adjustment
|
||
to a new era. Theology would be mingled with sociology. The church of
|
||
the spirit would be challenged with social problems, would be called
|
||
down into a battling arena of life. Newman’s intuition saw that the
|
||
challenge of liberalism meant a worried and harassed Church. He was
|
||
not interested in social and political questions. The old order had a
|
||
fixed charm for him. It soothed and sustained his life, and it was in
|
||
his own life that he was supremely interested. He loved dogma, but he
|
||
loved it as a priceless jewel that one does not wear. His emotion was
|
||
not really any more entangled in it than it was in social problems.
|
||
Given an established order that made his personal life possible, what
|
||
he was interested in was mystical meditation, the subtle and difficult
|
||
art of personal relations, and the exquisite ethical problems that
|
||
arise out of them.
|
||
Newman’s position was one of sublime common-sense. He saw that the
|
||
Protestant Church would be engaged for decades in the doleful task of
|
||
reconciling the broadening science with the old religious dogma. He
|
||
knew that this was ludicrous. He saw that liberalism was incompatible
|
||
with dogma. But mostly he saw that the new social and scientific turn
|
||
of men’s thinking was incompatible with the mellowed mystical and
|
||
personal life where lay his true genius. So, with a luminous sincerity,
|
||
following the appeal of his talents, he passed into the infallible
|
||
Church which should be a casket for the riches of his personal life.
|
||
He was saved thus from the sin of schism, and from the sin of adding
|
||
to that hopeless confusion of intellectual tongues which embroiled the
|
||
English world for the rest of the century. The Church guaranteed the
|
||
established order beneath him, blotted out the sociological worries
|
||
around him, and removed the incubus of dogma above him. Legitimacy
|
||
and infallibility did not imprison his person or his mind. On the
|
||
contrary, they freed him, because they abolished futilities from his
|
||
life. Nothing is clearer from the _Apologia_ than Newman’s sense of the
|
||
hideous vulgarity of theological discussion. He uses infallibility to
|
||
purge himself of that vulgarity. He uses it in exactly the way that it
|
||
should rightly be employed. The common view is that dogma is entrusted
|
||
to the Church because its truth is of such momentous import as to make
|
||
fatal the risk of error through private judgment. The Church is the
|
||
mother who suckles us with the precious milk of doctrine without which
|
||
we should die. Through ecclesiastical infallibility dogma becomes the
|
||
letter and spirit of religion, bony structure and life-blood.
|
||
But Newman’s use of infallibility was as a storage vault in which one
|
||
puts priceless securities. They are there for service when one wishes
|
||
to realize on their value. But in the business of daily living one
|
||
need not look at them from one year to another. Infallibility is the
|
||
strong lock of the safety-vault. It is a guarantee not of the value of
|
||
the wealth but of its protection. The wealth must have other grounds
|
||
for its valuableness, but one is assured that it will not be tampered
|
||
with. By surrendering all your dogmas to the keeper-Church, you win,
|
||
not certitude--for your treasures are no more certain inside the vault
|
||
than they are in your pocket--but assurance that you will not have to
|
||
see your life constantly interrupted by the need of defending them
|
||
against burglars, or of proving their genuineness for the benefit of
|
||
inquisitive and incredulous neighbors. The suspicion is irresistible
|
||
that Newman craved infallibility not because dogma was so supremely
|
||
significant to him, but because it was so supremely irrelevant. Nothing
|
||
could be more revealing than his acceptance of the doctrine of the
|
||
Immaculate Conception. He has no trouble whatever in believing this
|
||
belated and hotly-disdained dogma. Because it is essential to his
|
||
understanding of heaven and hell, eternity and the ineffable God?
|
||
On the contrary, because it is so quintessentially irrelevant to
|
||
anything that really entangles his emotions. His tone in acknowledging
|
||
his belief is airy, almost gay. He seems to feel no implications in
|
||
the belief. It merely rounds off a logical point in his theology. It
|
||
merely expresses in happy metaphor a poetical truth. To him there is no
|
||
tyranny in the promulgation of this new dogma. Infallibility, he seems
|
||
to suggest, removes from discussion ideas that otherwise one might be
|
||
weakly tempted to spend unprofitable hours arguing about.
|
||
And nothing could be more seductive than his belief in
|
||
Transubstantiation. Science, of course, declares this transmutation
|
||
of matter impossible. But science deals only with phenomena.
|
||
Transubstantiation has to do not with phenomena but with
|
||
things-in-themselves. And what has science to say about the inner
|
||
reality of things? Science itself would be the first to disclaim any
|
||
such competence. Why, therefore, should not the Church know as much
|
||
as anybody about the nature of this thing-in-itself? Why is it not as
|
||
easy to believe the Church’s testimony as to the nature of things as
|
||
it is to believe any testimony? Such dogma is therefore unassailable
|
||
by science. And if it cannot be criticized it might just as well be
|
||
infallible. The papal guarantee does not invade science. It merely
|
||
prëempts an uncharted region. It infringes no intellectual rights.
|
||
It steps in merely to withdraw from discussion ideas which would
|
||
otherwise be misused. Infallibility Newman uses as a shelf upon which
|
||
to store away his glowing but pragmatically sterile theological ideas,
|
||
while down below in the arena are left for discussion the interesting
|
||
aspects of life. He is at great pains to tell us that the Church is
|
||
infallible only in her expressly declared doctrine. It is only over a
|
||
few and definite dogmas that she presides infallibly. You surrender to
|
||
infallibility only those cosmic ideas it would do you no good to talk
|
||
of anyway. In the vast overflowing world of urgent practical life you
|
||
are free to speculate as you will. Underneath the eternal serene of
|
||
dogma is the darting vivid web of casuistry. Relieved of the inanity
|
||
of theological discussion, the Catholic may use his intellect on the
|
||
human world about him. That is why we are apt to find in the Catholic
|
||
the acute psychologist, while the Protestant remains embroiled in weary
|
||
dialectics.
|
||
Such a use of infallibility as Newman implies exposes the fallacy
|
||
of the Protestant position. For as soon as you have removed this
|
||
healthy check to theological embroilment you have opened the way to
|
||
intellectual corruption. As soon as you admit the right of individual
|
||
judgment in theological matters you have upset the balance between
|
||
dogma and life. The Catholic consigns his dogmas to the infallible
|
||
Church and speculates about the pragmatic issues of the dynamic
|
||
moral life. The Protestant on the other hand, encases himself in
|
||
an iron-bound morality and gives free rein to his fancy about the
|
||
eternal verities. The Catholic is empirical in ethics and dogmatic
|
||
in theology. The Protestant is dogmatic in ethics and more and more
|
||
empirical in theology. He speculates where it is futile to speculate,
|
||
because in supernatural matters you can never come by evidence to
|
||
any final, all-convincing truth. But he refuses to speculate where
|
||
a decent skepticism and a changing adjustment to human nature would
|
||
work out attitudes towards conduct that make for flowering and growth.
|
||
The Protestant infallibility of morals is the cruellest and least
|
||
defensible of all infallibilities. Protestantism passes most easily
|
||
into that fierce puritan form which constrains both conduct and belief.
|
||
The Protestant inevitably gravitates either towards puritanism or
|
||
towards unitarianism. The one petrifies in a harsh and narrow moral
|
||
code, the ordering of conduct by the most elderly, least aesthetic,
|
||
dullest and gloomiest elements in the community. The other mingles in
|
||
endless controversy over the attributes of deity, the history of its
|
||
workings in the world, and the power of the supernatural. Religion
|
||
becomes a village sewing-society, in which each member’s life is
|
||
lived in the fearful sight of all the others, while the tongues clack
|
||
endlessly about rumors that can never be proved and that no one outside
|
||
will ever find the slightest interest in having proved.
|
||
If the Catholic Church had used infallibility in the way that Newman
|
||
did, its influence could never have been accused of oppression.
|
||
There need never have been any warfare between theology and science.
|
||
Infallibility affords the Church an adroit way of continuing its
|
||
spiritual existence while it permits free speculation in science and
|
||
ethics to go on. Suppose the Church in its infallibility had not
|
||
stuck to dogma. Suppose the reformers had been successful, and the
|
||
Church had accepted early scientific truth. Suppose it had refused
|
||
any longer to insist on correctness in theological belief but had
|
||
insisted on correctness in scientific belief. Suppose the dogmas
|
||
of the Resurrection had made way for the first crude imperfect
|
||
generalizations in physics. Imagine the hideousness of a world where
|
||
scientific theories had been declared infallible by an all-powerful
|
||
Church! Our world’s safety lay exactly in the Church’s rejection of
|
||
science. If the Church had accepted science, scientific progress would
|
||
have been impossible. Progress was possible only by ignoring the
|
||
Church. Knowledge about the world could only advance through accepting
|
||
gratefully the freedom which the Church tacitly offered in all that
|
||
fallible field of the technique of earthly living. What progress we
|
||
have we owe not to any overcoming or converting of the Church but to a
|
||
scrupulous ignoring of her.
|
||
In punishing heresy the Church worked with a sound intuition. For a
|
||
heretic is not a man who ignores the Church. He is one who tries to
|
||
mix his theology and science. He could not be a heretic unless he
|
||
were a victim of muddy thinking, and as a muddy thinker he is as much
|
||
a nuisance to secular society as he is to the Church against which
|
||
he rebels. He is the officious citizen who tries to break into the
|
||
storage-vault with the benevolent intention of showing that the jewels
|
||
are paste. But all he usually accomplishes is to set the whole town by
|
||
the ears. The constructive daily life of the citizens is interrupted
|
||
in a flood of idle gossip. It is as much to the interest of the
|
||
intelligent authorities, who have important communal projects on hand,
|
||
to suppress him as it is to the interest of the owner of the jewels.
|
||
Heresy is fundamentally the error of trying to reconcile new knowledge
|
||
with old dogma. The would-be heretic could far more wisely ignore
|
||
theology altogether and pursue his realistic knowledge in the aloofness
|
||
which it requires. If there is still any theological taint in him, he
|
||
should not dabble in science at all. If there is none, the Church will
|
||
scarcely feel itself threatened and he will not appear as a heretic.
|
||
On the pestiferousness of the heretic both the Church and the most
|
||
modern realist can agree. Let theology deal with its world of dogma.
|
||
Let science deal with its world of analysable and measurable fact. Let
|
||
them never touch hands or recognize even each other’s existence.
|
||
The intellectual and spiritual chaos of the nineteenth century was
|
||
due to the prevalence of heresy which raged like an epidemic through
|
||
Europe. Minds which tried to test their new indubitable knowledge by
|
||
the presuppositions of faith were bound to be disordered and to spread
|
||
disorder around them. Faith and science tap different planes of the
|
||
soul, elicit different emotional currents. It is when the Church has
|
||
acted from full realization of this fact that it has remained strong.
|
||
Protestantism, trying to live in two worlds at the same time, has swept
|
||
thousands of excellent minds into a spiritual limbo where, in their
|
||
vague twilight realm of a modernity which has not quite sacrificed
|
||
theology, they have ceased to count for intellectual or spiritual light.
|
||
Perhaps the most pathetic of heresies is the “modernism” which is
|
||
spreading through the French and Italian Church. For this effort to
|
||
bring unitarian criticism into Catholic theology, to make over the
|
||
dogmas from within, to apply reason to the unreasonable, is really
|
||
the least “modern” of enterprises. It is only a belated Protestant
|
||
reformation, and if it succeeds it could do little more than add
|
||
another Protestant sect to the existing multitude. It would not in
|
||
the least have modernized Catholicism, for the most modern attitude
|
||
which one can take towards the Church is to ignore it entirely, to
|
||
cease to feel its validity in the new humane, democratic world that is
|
||
our vision. In other words, to take towards it exactly the attitude
|
||
which it takes towards itself. This is its strength. It has never
|
||
hesitated to accept pragmatic truth that was discovered by others.
|
||
The Catholic makes use of whatever scientific, industrial, political,
|
||
sociological development works, and adjusts himself without discomfort
|
||
to a dynamic world. He makes no attempt at reconciliation with the
|
||
supernatural. A Catholic hospital uses all the latest medical science
|
||
without exhibiting the least concern over its infallible “truth.” It is
|
||
doubtful whether the Church ever attempted to prevent Catholics from
|
||
adopting anything as long as they did not bother whether it was “true”
|
||
or not. This is the real mischief, to get your infallible divine truth
|
||
confused with your pragmatic human truth. The “modernist” in setting
|
||
about this confusion simply courts that expulsion which is his.
|
||
All this seemed to me implicit in the _Apologia_. But if the use Newman
|
||
made of infallibility destroys the Protestant position, it no less
|
||
destroys the Catholic. For if you use infallibility as a technique for
|
||
getting dogmas into a form in which they are easy to forget, you reduce
|
||
the Church from a repository of truth to a mere political institution.
|
||
When dogma is removed from discussion, religious truth becomes
|
||
irrelevant to life as it is commonly lived. The Church, therefore, can
|
||
touch life only through its political and organizing power, just as any
|
||
human institution touches life. It no longer touches it through the
|
||
divinely inspiring quality of its thought. Intellectually the Church
|
||
will only appeal to those cowed minds which have no critical power
|
||
and demand absolutism in thought. Spiritually it will appeal only to
|
||
temperaments like Newman’s which crave a guarantor for their mystic
|
||
life. Politically it will appeal to the subtle who want power through
|
||
the devious control over human souls. To few other types will it appeal.
|
||
Newman unveils the true paradox of dogma. If, on the one hand, you
|
||
throw it open to individual judgment, you destroy it through the
|
||
futile wranglings of faith which can never be objectively solved.
|
||
If, on the other hand, you declare it infallible, you destroy it by
|
||
slowly sending it to oblivion. Infallibility gets rid of dogma just as
|
||
surely as does private judgment. Under the pretense of consolidating
|
||
the Church in its cosmic rôle, Newman, therefore, has really put it
|
||
in its proper parochial place as a pleasant grouping of souls who are
|
||
similarly affected by a collection of beautiful and vigorous poetic
|
||
ideas. Fundamentally, however, this grouping has no more universal
|
||
significance than any other, than a secret society or any religious
|
||
sect.
|
||
Thus Newman unconsciously anticipates the most modern realist agnostic.
|
||
For the latter would agree that to relegate dogma to the storage-vault
|
||
of infallibility is exactly what ought to be done with dogma. At such
|
||
an infallible as Newman pictures no modern radical need balk. Newman’s
|
||
argument means little more than that infallibility is merely the
|
||
politest way of sending an idea to Nirvana. What more can the liberal
|
||
ask who is finished with theology and all its works? He can accept
|
||
this infallible in even another sense. For there is not a single
|
||
Christian doctrine in which he does not feel a kind of wild accuracy.
|
||
Every Christian dogma has a poetic vigor about it which might just as
|
||
well be called “true” because to deny its metaphorical power would
|
||
certainly be to utter an untruth. Indeed is not poetry the only “truth”
|
||
that can be called infallible? For scientific truth is constantly being
|
||
developed, revised, re-applied. It is only poetry that can think in
|
||
terms of absolutes. Science cannot because it is experimental. But
|
||
poetry may, because each soul draws its own meaning from the words. And
|
||
dogma is poetry.
|
||
To render dogma infallible is to make it something that no longer
|
||
has to be fought for. This attitude ultimately undermines the whole
|
||
structure for belief. If it is only infallible ideas that we are to
|
||
believe, then belief loses all its moral force. It is no longer a
|
||
fierce struggle to maintain one’s intellectual position. Nothing is
|
||
at stake. One is not braced in faith with the hosts of hell assailing
|
||
one’s citadel. To the puritan, belief meant something to be gloweringly
|
||
and tenaciously held against the world, the flesh and the devil. But
|
||
Catholic belief, in the Newman atmosphere, is too sheltered, too safely
|
||
insured, to count excitingly. One only yawns over it, as his own deep
|
||
soul must have secretly yawned over it, and turns aside to the genuine
|
||
issues of life. But this is just what we should do with belief. We are
|
||
passing out of the faith era, and belief, as an intellectual attitude,
|
||
has almost ceased to play an active part in our life. In the scientific
|
||
attitude there is no place whatever for belief. We have no right to
|
||
“believe” anything unless it has been experimentally proved. But if it
|
||
has been proved, then we do not say we “believe” it, because this would
|
||
imply that an alternative was possible. All we do is to register our
|
||
common assent to the new truth’s incontrovertibility. Nor has belief
|
||
any place in the loose, indecisive issues of ordinary living. We have
|
||
to act constantly on insufficient evidence, on the best “opinion” we
|
||
can get. But opinion is not belief, and we are lost if we treat it so.
|
||
Belief is dogmatic, but opinion has value only when it is tentative,
|
||
questioning. The fact is that in modern thinking the attitude of belief
|
||
has given place to what may be called the higher plausibility. Stern,
|
||
rugged conviction which has no scientific background behind it is
|
||
coming to be dealt with rather impatiently by the modern mind. We have
|
||
difficulty in distinguishing it from prejudice. There is no hostility
|
||
to faith, if by “faith” we only mean an emotional core of desire
|
||
driving towards some ideal. But idealism is a very different thing from
|
||
belief. Belief is impelled from behind; it is sterile, fixed. Belief
|
||
has no seeds of progress, no constructive impulse. An ideal, on the
|
||
other hand, is an illumined end towards which our hopes and endeavors
|
||
converge. It looks forward and pulls us along with it. It is ideals and
|
||
not beliefs that motivate the modern mind. It is meaningless to say
|
||
that we “believe” in our ideals. This separates our ideals from us. But
|
||
what they are is just the push of our temperaments towards perfection.
|
||
They are what is most inseparably and intrinsically ourselves. The
|
||
place of a belief which put truth outside of us and made virtue a hard
|
||
clinging to it has been taken by the idealism which merges us with the
|
||
growing end we wish to achieve.
|
||
Newman illustrates the perpetual paradox of ecclesiasticism, that the
|
||
more devoutly you accept the Church the less important you make it.
|
||
As you press closer and closer to its mystic heart, its walls and
|
||
forms and ideas crumble and fade. The better Catholic you are, the
|
||
more insidious your vitiation of Catholicism. So that the Church has
|
||
remained strong only through its stout politicians and not through
|
||
its saints. As a casket for the precious jewel of mysticism, it
|
||
cannot die. But shorn of its political power it shrinks to a poetical
|
||
society of mystics, held together by the strong and earthy bond of
|
||
men who enjoy the easy expression of power over the least intelligent
|
||
and intellectually assertive masses in Western society. The Church
|
||
declines towards its natural limits. No attack on it, no undermining
|
||
of it from within, can destroy religious feeling, for that is an
|
||
organization of sentiments that are incarnate in man. Newman’s emotion,
|
||
whatever his mind may have done, reached through to this eternal heart.
|
||
Implicit in his intellect, however, is that demolition of religious
|
||
intellectuality which has freed our minds for the work of the future.
|
||
He was an unconscious pioneer. Ostensibly reactionary, he reveals in
|
||
his own _Apologia_ an anticipation of our modern outlook. His use of
|
||
infallibility insidiously destroys the foundations of belief.
|
||
IMPRESSIONS OF EUROPE 1913-14[1]
|
||
It was my good fortune as holder of the Gilder Fellowship in this
|
||
University to spend in Europe the thirteen months immediately preceding
|
||
the war. I used the opportunity for extensive travel and general
|
||
acclimatization rather than for specialized research, and was thus
|
||
able to get an extensive survey of the European scheme on the eve of
|
||
a cataclysm from which it may emerge entirely altered. No one can
|
||
predict how truly that year will mark the “end of an era.” It seems
|
||
true, however, that most of the tendencies of democracy, social reform,
|
||
and international understanding, to whose development I gave my most
|
||
eager attention, have been snapped off like threads, perhaps never to
|
||
be pieced together again. And the material development, so striking in
|
||
Germany and Italy, the rebuilding of the cities and the undertaking of
|
||
vast communal projects, will be indefinitely checked, from sheer want
|
||
of capital, wasted in the war.
|
||
[1] Report to the Trustees of Columbia University, 1914.
|
||
No one was more innocent than I of the impending horror. In fact,
|
||
this menacing “armed camp” actually seemed to bristle in less sharply
|
||
defined lines when seen at close range. Public opinion seemed far
|
||
less violent than I had expected. In England there was the persistent
|
||
hostility to Compulsory Service, the gnawing compunction at the folly
|
||
of the Boer War, the complete subsidence of the panic over German
|
||
invasion. In France, there was the unyielding opposition to the new
|
||
three-years’ military law, culminating in the radical victory at
|
||
the April parliamentary elections, a clear national expression of
|
||
reluctance at the increased military expenditures; there was the superb
|
||
irony of the French press over the Zabern affair, where one would have
|
||
expected a raging chauvinism; there was the general public deprecation
|
||
of the activities of the royalists, and the constant discrediting of
|
||
their Alsace-Lorraine propaganda. In Italy I had seen the wild outburst
|
||
of reaction against the criminal Tripolitan war, and the great general
|
||
strike of June, a direct popular uprising against war and militarism.
|
||
Perhaps if I had spent the winter in Germany, I should have felt the
|
||
drift towards war, but even there all the opinion I heard was of some
|
||
gigantic slow-moving Slavic pressure, against which defence must be
|
||
made. And if public and press were full of blatant world-defiance, the
|
||
spirit certainly escaped my attention. My mind became quite reconciled
|
||
to the fact of “armed peace.” My imagination unconsciously began to
|
||
envisage armaments as mere frozen symbols of power, grim, menacing and
|
||
costly, yet little more than graphic expressions, in a language that
|
||
all the world could understand, of the relative strength and prestige
|
||
of the nations. In spite of the uniforms that sprinkled the sidewalks
|
||
and the wagon-trains that littered the streets, my imagination simply
|
||
refused to take them as dynamic. And there was little in press and
|
||
people to make me think that they themselves took them as dynamic. How
|
||
I should have acted if I had known of the imminence of the world-war
|
||
I do not know, but in the light of the event my rambles and interests
|
||
take on the aspect of the toddlings of an innocent child about the edge
|
||
of a volcano’s crater.
|
||
I can give, however, a few indications of what such an innocent
|
||
mind might see and feel in Europe, this year of last breathless
|
||
hush before the explosion. I concerned myself with getting, first,
|
||
a clear impression of the physical body in which each country
|
||
clothed itself,--the aspect of town and countryside, villages,
|
||
farms, working-class quarters, factories, suburbs, plans of towns,
|
||
styles of architecture, characteristic types and ways of living, of
|
||
modern Europe; and, second, the attitudes, social and political, of
|
||
various classes, the social psychology of the different peoples. Such
|
||
acquisitions had, of course, to be the merest impressions. One could
|
||
not get “data”; one’s tour could be little more than a perpetual
|
||
“sizing-up.” The best one could do was to settle down in the various
|
||
capitals for a few months, immerse oneself in the newspapers, talk
|
||
with as many people as one could reach, read the contemporary novels
|
||
and plays, attend political meetings and meetings of social reformers,
|
||
go to church and court-house and school and library and university,
|
||
and watch the national life in action. One could only cut oneself off
|
||
from American interests, imagine that one had always lived in the
|
||
foreign city, and try, by a reach of sympathy and appreciation, to
|
||
assimilate the tone and spirit and attitudes of the people among whom
|
||
one was living. Such an effort may result only in the most fantastic
|
||
illusions. I am not trying to boast that I got any understanding of
|
||
European countries,--a matter of years of acquaintance and not of
|
||
months. I am merely indicating an attitude of approach. But it was an
|
||
attitude I found none too common among American students abroad. Among
|
||
the many who were conducting historical and political researches at
|
||
the libraries, I was never able to find any student interested in the
|
||
political meetings of the campaign, for instance, which I attended
|
||
with so much ardor, as a revelation of French social psychology.
|
||
The Americans I saw would have an enthusiasm for particular things,
|
||
perhaps, that they were interested in, a patronizing attitude towards
|
||
certain immoralities and inefficiencies that impressed them, but as for
|
||
a curiosity about the French mind and the French culture as a whole, I
|
||
could not find any interest that flowed along with mine. My curiosity,
|
||
therefore, had to go its own gait. I seemed to have a singular faculty
|
||
for not getting information. Unless one is fortunate enough to step
|
||
into a social group, one must dig one’s way along unaided. By means
|
||
of newspapers and magazines and guide-books, one hews out a little
|
||
passage towards the center of things. Slowly a definite picture is
|
||
built up of the culture and psychology of the people among whom one is
|
||
living. There is no way, however, of checking up one’s impressions.
|
||
One must rely on one’s intuition. Letters of introduction bring out
|
||
only class or professional attitudes. Very few people are socially
|
||
introspective enough to map out for you the mind of the society in
|
||
which they live. Only the French seem to have this self-consciousness
|
||
of their own traits, and the gift of expression, and that is why France
|
||
is incomparably the most interesting and enlightening country for the
|
||
amateur and curious American student to visit.
|
||
These considerations suggest the fact that I wish to bring out,--that
|
||
my most striking impression was the extraordinary toughness and
|
||
homogeneity of the cultural fabric in the different countries,
|
||
England, France, Italy and Germany, that I studied. Each country was
|
||
a distinct unit, the parts of which hung together, and interpreted
|
||
each other, styles and attitudes, literature, architecture, and social
|
||
organization. This idea is of course a truism, yet brought up, as
|
||
most Americans are, I think, with the idea that foreigners are just
|
||
human beings living on other parts of the earth’s surface, “folks”
|
||
like ourselves with accidental differences of language and customs,
|
||
I was genuinely shocked to find distinct national temperaments,
|
||
distinct psychologies and attitudes, distinct languages that embodied,
|
||
not different sounds for the same meanings, but actually different
|
||
meanings. We really know all this; but when we write about the war,
|
||
for instance, we insensibly fall back to our old attitude. Most
|
||
American comment on the war, even the most intelligent, suggests a
|
||
complete ignorance of the fact that there is a German mind, and a
|
||
French mind and an English mind, each a whole bundle of attitudes
|
||
and interpretations that harmonize and support each other. And each
|
||
of these national minds feels its own reasons and emotions and
|
||
justifications to be cosmically grounded, just as we ourselves feel
|
||
that Anglo-Saxon morality is Morality, and Anglo-Saxon freedom Liberty.
|
||
We do, of course, more or less dimly recognize these differences of
|
||
national culture. We no longer think of other nations as “Barbarians,”
|
||
unless they have a national scheme which is as much of a challenge to
|
||
our own social inefficiency as is the German. We express our sense of
|
||
the difference by a constant belittling. Foreigners are not monsters,
|
||
but Lilliputians, dwarfs, playing with toys. We do not take other
|
||
cultures seriously. We tend to dwell on the amusing, the quaint,
|
||
the picturesque, rather than the intense emotional and intellectual
|
||
differences. The opportunity to immerse oneself in these various
|
||
cultures until one feels their powerful and homogeneous strength,
|
||
their meaning and depth, until one takes each with entire seriousness
|
||
and judges it, not in American terms, but in its own,--this is the
|
||
educative value of a rapid, superficial European year such as mine.
|
||
The only American book I have ever been able to find that deals with
|
||
a foreign country in this adequate sense is Mr. Brownell’s “French
|
||
Traits.” Almost all other writing, political, historical, descriptive,
|
||
about European countries, must be read with the constant realization
|
||
that the peculiar emotional and intellectual biases of the people, the
|
||
temperamental traits, the soul which animates all their activities and
|
||
expressions, have all been omitted from consideration by the author.
|
||
I can only give fragmentary hints in this short article of the
|
||
incidents which built up my sense of these differences of national
|
||
cultures. London was the place where I had the best opportunities for
|
||
meeting people through letters of introduction. There were glimpses of
|
||
the Webbs at a meeting of the Fabian Society, which seems to retain the
|
||
allegiance of its old members rather than enlist the enthusiasm of the
|
||
younger generation. At their house Mr. Webb talked, as he lectures,
|
||
with the patient air of a man expounding arithmetic to backward
|
||
children, and Mrs. Webb, passive by his side, spoke only to correct
|
||
some slight slip on his part; there was another picture of her sweeping
|
||
into the _New Statesman_ office and producing a sudden panic of
|
||
reverent awe among the editorial staff. Lectures by Shaw and Chesterton
|
||
on succeeding nights--Shaw, clean, straight, clear and fine as an
|
||
upland wind and summer sun; Chesterton, gluttonous and thick, with
|
||
something tricky and unsavory about him--gave me a personal estimate
|
||
of their contrasted philosophies. Then there was Professor Hobhouse,
|
||
excessively judicial, with that high consciousness of excellence
|
||
which the Liberal professor seems to exude; Graham Wallas, with his
|
||
personal vivacity of expression and lack of any clear philosophy,
|
||
who considered the American sociologist a national disaster; H. G.
|
||
Wells, a suggestive talker, but very disappointing personally; John A.
|
||
Hobson, whom I cannot admire too much, a publicist with immense stores
|
||
of knowledge, poise of mind, and yet radical philosophy and gifts of
|
||
journalistic expression, a type that we simply do not seem to be able
|
||
to produce in this country.
|
||
I expected to find the atmosphere of London very depressing. On the
|
||
contrary, a sort of fatuous cheerfulness seemed to reign everywhere on
|
||
the streets, in middle-class homes, even in the slums. This impressed
|
||
me as the prevailing tone of English life. Wells and Bennett seem to
|
||
have caught it exactly. As for the world that Mr. Galsworthy lives in,
|
||
though I looked hard for his people, I could find nothing with the
|
||
remotest resemblance. Such a tone of optimism is possible only to an
|
||
unimaginative people who are well schooled against personal reactions,
|
||
and against the depressing influences of environment--slums and fog
|
||
and a prevailing stodginess of middle-class life--that would affect
|
||
the moods of more impressionable peoples. In certain educated circles
|
||
this tone gave an impression of incorrigible intellectual frivolity.
|
||
London has fashions in talk. Significant discussion almost did not
|
||
exist. A running fire of ideational badinage, “good talk,” took its
|
||
place. Every idea tended to go up in smoke. You found your tone either
|
||
monstrously prophetic, as of a young Jeremiah sitting at the board, or
|
||
else unpleasantly cynical. Irony does not seem to be known in England.
|
||
The impression one got from the newspapers and magazines and popular
|
||
books was of a sort of exuberant irrelevance, a vivacity of interest
|
||
about matters that seemed quite alien to the personal and social issues
|
||
of life as one knew it. There seemed indeed to be a direct avoidance
|
||
of these issues. One could never discover whether or how much an
|
||
Englishman “cared.” The national mind seemed to have made a sort of
|
||
permanent derangement of intellect from emotion. In no country is so
|
||
large a proportion of the literary product a mere hobby of leisurely
|
||
gentlemen whose interests are quite elsewhere. The literary supplements
|
||
of the newspapers used to contain the greatest collection of futilities
|
||
that I ever saw. One got the impression that the intellectual life of
|
||
the country was “hobbyized,” that ideas were taken as sports, just
|
||
as sports were taken as serious issues. This impression was rather
|
||
confirmed at Oxford, where the anthropologist, Marrett, turned out
|
||
to be a Jersey country gentleman, digging up prehistoric bones on
|
||
his place, and mentioning Chesterton as “entertaining writer--even
|
||
had him down here to lunch, but not a ‘gentleman,’ you know, not a
|
||
‘gentleman.’” Oxford itself seemed to be one long play of schoolboys
|
||
in the soft damp November air. Schiller, who gave me a delightful
|
||
morning, after I had attended his class where the boys came in their
|
||
black gowns and sat at primitive desks in the low room before a blazing
|
||
fire, from which one looked out on mouldering walls and dead ivy and
|
||
the pale morning sun and wan sweet decay, drew a wicked picture of the
|
||
dons satisfying their thwarted sporting instincts by putting their
|
||
boys through their intellectual paces and pitting them against each
|
||
other in scholastic competition like race-horses. Mr. McDougall, large
|
||
and with an Irish courtliness, I heard and liked, and Mr. L. P. Jacks
|
||
talked with me at Manchester College. A meeting of the Fabians at St.
|
||
John’s and a lecture by Mrs. Pember Reeves on “Coöperation” attracted
|
||
me, with her dramatic flaring out at the stolid audience for their
|
||
“English” lack of imagination--she came from New Zealand--the inanely
|
||
facetious comments of the dons, the lumbering discourses of certain
|
||
beefy burgesses from the local “Coöperative,” who had not followed well
|
||
the lady’s nimble thought. Every little incident of the Oxford week of
|
||
classes and rambles fitted into a picture of the place as a perfect
|
||
epitome of English life, past and present. It was even more than London
|
||
a world.
|
||
Politically, London was dead that autumn. No parliament, and every one
|
||
weary of politics. The bitter Dublin strike dragged along with its
|
||
reverberations through the English labor situation, which showed unrest
|
||
and dissatisfaction with its leaders and much more of “syndicalist”
|
||
leaning than any one would admit. A debate, heard later in Paris,
|
||
hit the English labor situation off beautifully,--Longuet, arguing
|
||
that there was no syndicalism in England because all the leaders had
|
||
written him there wasn’t; Joyaux, arguing that there was, because the
|
||
unions were using forms of “direct action” and acting exactly “as if”
|
||
syndicalist ideas were spreading.
|
||
The Lloyd George land campaign for the bettering of rural labor
|
||
conditions was beginning, but was arousing so little enthusiasm that,
|
||
with the intense dissatisfaction over the Insurance Acts that rose from
|
||
every class, one wondered if the energy of the Liberal social program
|
||
had about spent itself. The London press, solidly Tory--extraordinary
|
||
situation for a Liberal country--was finding, besides its social
|
||
grievances, the Ulster theme to play upon. Indefatigable industry,
|
||
worthy of a better cause, was apparently being exercised to drum up
|
||
reluctant English sentiment against Home Rule. All that autumn we lived
|
||
ostensibly on the brink of a civil war, whose first mutterings did not
|
||
even occur till the next July.
|
||
The suffragettes were quiescent, but their big meetings at
|
||
Knightsbridge gave one a new insight into the psychology of the
|
||
movement. As one watched this fusion of the grotesque and the tragic,
|
||
these pale martyrs carried in amidst the reverent hush of a throng as
|
||
mystically religious as ever stood around the death-bed of a saint; or
|
||
as one heard the terrific roars of “Shame!” that went up at the mention
|
||
of wrongs done to women, one realized that one was in the presence of
|
||
English emotion, long starved and dried from its proper channels of
|
||
expression, and now breaking out irrepressibly into these new and wild
|
||
ways. It was the reverse side of the idolized English “reticence.” It
|
||
was a pleasant little commentary on the Victorian era. Suffragettism
|
||
is what you get when you turn your whole national psychic energy into
|
||
divorcing emotion from expression and from intellect.
|
||
A hysterical Larkin meeting in Albert Hall; meetings of the Lansbury
|
||
people in the East End, with swarms of capped, cheerful, dirty, stodgy
|
||
British workmen; a big Churchill meeting at Alexandra Palace, from
|
||
which seventeen hecklers were thrown out, dully, one after the other,
|
||
on their heads, after terrific scrimmages in the audience; quieter
|
||
lectures at the Sociological Society, etc.; churches and law-courts,
|
||
and tutorial classes, and settlements, and garden cities, and talks
|
||
with many undistinguished people, rounded out my London impression, and
|
||
in December I moved my stage to Paris.
|
||
The weeks of getting a hearing acquaintance with the language were
|
||
spent in reading sociology at the Bibliothèque Ste. Geneviève,
|
||
exchanging conversation with students at the Sorbonne, and attending
|
||
still not understood lectures, in the hope that some day the electric
|
||
spark of apprehension might flash. I soon felt an intellectual
|
||
vivacity, a sincerity and candor, a tendency to think emotions and feel
|
||
ideas, that integrated again the spiritual world as I knew it, and
|
||
wiped out those irrelevances and facetiousnesses and puzzle-interests
|
||
and sporting attitudes towards life, that so got on one’s nerves
|
||
in England. Here was also a democracy, not a society all shot into
|
||
intellectual and social castes, where one lived shut in with ideas and
|
||
attitudes that, like the proverbial ostrich, annihilated the rest of
|
||
the world. In England, unless you were a “social reformer,” you did
|
||
not know anything about anybody but your own class; in France there
|
||
seemed to be scarcely any social reformers, but everybody assumed an
|
||
intelligent interest in everything. In short, a democracy, where you
|
||
criticized everything and everybody, and neither attempted to “lift”
|
||
the “lower orders” nor “ordered yourself lowly and reverently towards
|
||
your betters.” There was a solid, robust air of equality, which one
|
||
felt in no other country, certainly not our own. The labor movement
|
||
had an air of helping itself, and its leaders showed an intellectuality
|
||
that ranked them with the professional men. In fact, the distinction
|
||
between the “intellectual” and the non-intellectual seems to have
|
||
quite broken down in France. Manners, styles of speech, pronunciation,
|
||
ideas, the terms in which things are phrased, seem to flow rather
|
||
freely over all the classes. Class-distinctions, which hit you in the
|
||
face in England and America--I mean, differences of manner and speech,
|
||
attitudes of contempt or admiration for other types--are much blurred.
|
||
The language has remained simple, pure, usable without the triteness
|
||
and vulgarity which dogs English, and which constitutes the most subtle
|
||
evidence of our inherent Anglo-Saxon snobbery. It was a new world,
|
||
where the values and the issues of life got reinstated for me into
|
||
something of their proper relative emphasis.
|
||
With few letters of introduction, acclimatization was much more
|
||
difficult than in London. One had to hew one’s way around by the aid
|
||
of the newspapers. These are infinitely more expressive of every
|
||
shade of political opinion than is the London press. They provided
|
||
a complete education in the contemporary world. Supplemented by
|
||
the interesting symposiums in the reviews, and the mapping-out of
|
||
the various French intellectual worlds which the young _agrégés_
|
||
and instructors I met were always eager to give me, the Paris press
|
||
provided a witty, interpretative daily articulation of the French
|
||
mind at work. It is a very self-conscious and articulate mind,
|
||
interested in the psychological artistic aspects of life rather than
|
||
the objective active aspects which appeal to the English. Life to
|
||
the Anglo-Saxon is what people are doing; to the Latin, rather the
|
||
stream of consciousness, what individuals and also what groups are
|
||
thinking and feeling. This all makes for clear thinking, constant
|
||
interpretation--I noticed that my young lawyer friend was all the
|
||
time saying “Voilà! mon explication!”--and an amount of what might be
|
||
called social introspection that makes France the easiest as well as
|
||
the most stimulating country to become acquainted with. The French are
|
||
right in telling you that their scholarship is not the collection of
|
||
insignificant facts, but the interpretation of significant ones, the
|
||
only kind of scholarship that is worth anything.
|
||
In Paris, I continued my general policy of running down the various
|
||
social institutions, churches, courts, schools, political meetings,
|
||
model tenements, etc., in order to get, at least, a taste of French
|
||
society in operation. I poked about the various quarters of town and
|
||
countryside, and talked to as many people as I could meet. After the
|
||
lectures at the Sorbonne became intelligible, I followed the public
|
||
courses of Bouglé and Delacroix and Burkheim in sociology, and when
|
||
the campaign for the parliamentary election came I plunged into that,
|
||
following the bulletin boards of the parties, with their flaring
|
||
manifestoes--among them the royalists’ “A Bas La République!” calmly
|
||
left posted on the government’s own official bulletin-board, as
|
||
evidence of the most superb political tolerance I suppose any country
|
||
has ever shown!--and attending the disorderly meetings held in the
|
||
dingy playrooms of the public schoolhouses or in crowded cafés. French
|
||
freedom of speech has been struggled for too long not to be prized
|
||
when won, and the refusal to silence interrupters made each meeting a
|
||
contest of wits and eloquence between the speaker and his audience. The
|
||
most extraordinary incident of “fair play” I ever saw--Anglo-Saxons
|
||
simply do not know what “fair play” is--was at one of Bouglé’s
|
||
meetings, where the chairman allowed one of his political opponents,
|
||
who had repeatedly interrupted Bouglé, to take the platform and hold
|
||
it for half an hour, attacking Bouglé and stating his own creed. When
|
||
he had finished Bouglé took him up point by point, demolished him, and
|
||
went on with his own exposition. This at his own meeting, called by his
|
||
own Radical Party, to forward his candidature! When I left at 12:45 A.
|
||
M. the meeting was still in progress. At a Socialist meeting an old
|
||
Catholic, looking exactly like Napoleon III, was allowed to hold forth
|
||
for several minutes from a chair, until the impatient audience howled
|
||
him off. _Young normaliennes_, representing the suffrage movement,
|
||
appeared at meetings of all the parties, and were given the platform
|
||
to plead the cause of women as long as the crowd would listen. These
|
||
young girls were treated exactly as men; there was no trace of either
|
||
chivalry or vulgarity, the audience reacted directly and intensely to
|
||
their ideas and not to them. The first impulse of a Frenchman actually
|
||
seems to be, when he hears something he doesn’t like, not to stop
|
||
the other fellow’s mouth, but to answer him, and not with a taunt,
|
||
or disarming wit, but with an argument. In the Chamber of Deputies
|
||
the same spirit prevailed. The only visible signs of parliamentary
|
||
order were Deschanel’s clashing of his big bell and his despairing
|
||
“Voulez-vous écouter! Voulez-vous écouter!” The speaker in the tribune
|
||
held it as long as he was permitted by his hearers; his interrupter
|
||
would himself be interrupted and would exchange words across the
|
||
chamber while the official speaker looked resignedly on. The Left would
|
||
go off as one man in violent explosions of wrath, shake their fists
|
||
at the Center, call out epithets. Yet this was a dull session that
|
||
I saw, only a matter of raising the pay of generals. Certainly the
|
||
campaign of that election against the new Three Years’ Military Law
|
||
seems very far away now. The crowd outside the Mairie of the Vᵐᵉ the
|
||
night of the election shouting “A--Bas--Les-Trois-Ans,” in the same
|
||
rhythmic way that the law-students a few weeks earlier had marched down
|
||
rue St. Jacques yelling “Cail--laux--as-sassin!” knew no more than I
|
||
how soon they would need this defence of more soldiers. The cheers of
|
||
the crowd as the splendid cortege of the English sovereigns swept
|
||
along the streets seem more important than they did to me at the time.
|
||
Doumergue’s stand-pat ministry, with which my stay in Paris almost
|
||
exactly coincided, and during which the income-tax, lay-instruction,
|
||
and proportional representation issues slowly made progress, appears
|
||
now in the light of a holding everything safe till the election was
|
||
over, and the President could stem the tide of reaction against the new
|
||
military laws. France was waiting for the blow to fall that might be
|
||
mortal.
|
||
On the first of May I was in Nîmes, delightful Southern city,--where
|
||
gaunt Protestants gave out tracts in the cars, and newspapers devoted
|
||
to bull-fighting graced the news-stands,--reading the big red posters
|
||
of the socialist mayor, summoning all the workmen to leave off work and
|
||
come out to celebrate the International. Indeed a foreign land!
|
||
I arrived in Genoa the evening the Kaiser landed from Corfu, and
|
||
witnessed the pompous and important event. In Pisa, I stepped into
|
||
a demonstration of students, who were moving rapidly about the city
|
||
closing the schools and making speeches to each other, as a protest
|
||
against harsh treatment of Italians by the Austrian government in
|
||
Trieste, the passionate _leit motiv_ of Italia Irredenta that runs
|
||
through all current Italian thought and feeling. In Florence I began to
|
||
understand “futurism,” that crude and glaring artistic expression which
|
||
arises from the intolerable ennui of the ancient art with which the
|
||
young Italian is surrounded, the swarms of uncritical foreigners, the
|
||
dead museums. That Mona Lisa smile of Florence drove me soon to Rome,
|
||
where I sensed the real Italy, with its industrial and intellectual
|
||
ferment, its new renaissance of the twentieth century.
|
||
Rome is not a city, it is a world. Every century, from the first to the
|
||
twentieth, has left its traces. It is the one city in Europe to study
|
||
western civilization, an endless source of suggestion, stimulation and
|
||
delight. It is the one city where the ancient and the ultra-modern live
|
||
side by side, both brimming over with vitality. The Church and the most
|
||
advanced and determined body of social revolutionists living side by
|
||
side; the Vatican galleries faced by the futurist; a statue of Ferrer
|
||
just outside Bernini’s colonnade; rampant democracy confronting Prince
|
||
Colonnas and Borgheses; Renaissance palaces, and blocks of monstrous
|
||
apartments built in the mad speculation after 1870; all the tendencies
|
||
and ideas of all Europe contending there in Rome, at once the most
|
||
ancient and the most modern city we know. What is a month in Rome!
|
||
I could do little more than disentangle the political currents, get
|
||
familiar with certain names in the intellectual world, and plot
|
||
out the city, historically and sociologically, after a fashion. A
|
||
noted psychologist, Dr. Assagioli in Florence, had gone over the
|
||
philosophical situation for me; and in Rome, Professor Pettazoni of
|
||
the university told me of the political tendencies. A young Modernist
|
||
priest, discharged from his theological professorship for suspected
|
||
connection with the “Programma,” who talked about as much English as I
|
||
did Italian, proved very friendly and informing, and gave me a sense
|
||
of that vast subterranean, resistless, democratizing and liberalizing
|
||
movement in the Church. Various types, Italian cavalry officers,
|
||
professors of pedagogy, Sicilian lawyers, an emotional law student
|
||
from Lecce, who took me to the university and talked republicanism to
|
||
me, passed through the pension. And in Rome anyway you simply seeped
|
||
Italy in, from the newspapers, as vivid and varied as those in Paris,
|
||
and the host of little democratic and political weeklies, most of
|
||
them recent, but fervent and packed with ideas that indicated a great
|
||
ferment of young intellectual Italy. The young Florentine Papini gives
|
||
in his picturesque books the picture of the Italian soul struggling
|
||
with French, English and German ideas, and trying to hew some sort
|
||
of order out of the chaos. One got the impression that Nietzsche was
|
||
raging through the young Italian mind. But I was all for the candor and
|
||
sympathy and personality of this expression. Papers like “La Voce,”
|
||
published by Papini’s friends, have an idealistic sweep such as we
|
||
simply cannot imagine or, I suppose, appreciate in this country. I had
|
||
touched a different national mind. Expressions which seem wild to us
|
||
fell there into their proper and interpretative order.
|
||
My impression was that almost anything might happen in Italy. While
|
||
I was in Rome, the Pope was drawing protests from even the most
|
||
conservative clerical dailies for his obscurantism. The country seemed
|
||
to be disillusionizing itself about representative government, which,
|
||
though it had become perfectly democratic, and had the most sweeping
|
||
program of social reform, was clumsy and ineffective, and had utterly
|
||
failed to carry out the popular hopes. The Crown scarcely seemed to be
|
||
taken much more seriously than in Norway. Republican sentiment cropped
|
||
up in unexpected places. Nationalism grew apace, cleverly stimulated
|
||
by the new capitalistic bourgeoisie and the new industry, which first
|
||
impressed you as you came through the long string of gayly-colored,
|
||
swarming factory towns on the coast between Ventimiglia and Genoa.
|
||
Political parties, Nationalist, Constitutionalist, Republican,
|
||
Socialist, etc., seemed as numerous as in France, but there was not the
|
||
same fluctuation, for the expert governmental hand kept a majority, in
|
||
the Camera. This body gave little of the impression of dignity that one
|
||
had felt in the French Chamber. One felt that while in Italy democratic
|
||
feeling was almost as genuine and universal as in France, political
|
||
democracy had by no means proved its worth. That Latin passion for
|
||
intellectual sincerity and articulation--that quality which makes the
|
||
Latin the most sympathetic and at the same time the most satisfactory
|
||
person in the world, because you can always know that his outward
|
||
expression bears some relation to his inward feeling--had resulted, as
|
||
in France, in the duplication of parties, which were constantly holding
|
||
congresses and issuing programs, and then splitting up into dissentient
|
||
groups. This trait may be unfortunate politically; but it certainly
|
||
makes for sincerity and intelligence, and all the other virtues which
|
||
our Anglo-Saxon two-party system is well devised to destroy.
|
||
This Latin quality of not being reticent, of reacting directly and
|
||
truthfully, had its most dramatic expression in the great general
|
||
strike of June, which I witnessed in Rome. Disgust and chagrin at
|
||
the Tripolitan war, a general reaction against militarism, had been
|
||
slowly accumulating in the working classes, and the smouldering feeling
|
||
was touched off into a revolutionary explosion by the shooting of
|
||
two demonstrators at Ancona by the police on the festival day of the
|
||
Statuto. This was followed in Rome, as in most of the other cities
|
||
of Italy, by a complete suspension of work. No cars or wagons moved
|
||
for three days; no shops or stores opened their doors; none of the
|
||
public services were performed; the only newspaper was a little red
|
||
“bolletino” which told of the riots of the day before. One did nothing
|
||
but walk the garbage-littered streets, past the shuttered windows and
|
||
barricaded doors, and watch the long lines of infantry surrounding
|
||
the public squares, and the mounted carabinieri holding the Piazza
|
||
del Popolo, to prevent meetings and demonstrations. The calm spirit
|
||
of the troops, surrounded by the excited crowds, was admirable. And
|
||
the overwhelming expression of social solidarity displayed by this
|
||
suspended city made one realize that here were radical classes that had
|
||
the courage of their convictions. On the third day, the conservative
|
||
classes recovered their breath, and I saw the slightly fearful
|
||
demonstration of shouting youths who moved down the Via del Tritone
|
||
while great Italian flags swung out from one window after another,
|
||
greeted with wild hand-clapping from every thronged bourgeois balcony.
|
||
The next day the darting trolley-cars told the strike was over, but
|
||
two days later I alighted at the Naples station into a fortress held
|
||
by Bersaglieri against a mob who had been trying all day to burn the
|
||
station. The shooting kept us inside until the last rioters were
|
||
dispersed, and the great protest was over, though it was days before
|
||
the people of the Romagna, where railroads and telegraphs were cut,
|
||
were convinced that the monarchy had not fallen and a republic been
|
||
proclaimed. The government had kept very quiet, except for the floods
|
||
of oratory that rolled through the Camera; if it had not, there might
|
||
have been a real revolution, instead of merely the taste and thrill of
|
||
one.
|
||
My last political experience in Italy was election night in Venice,
|
||
with the triumph of the conservatives, who had made no bones of the
|
||
economic interpretation of politics, but had placarded the city with
|
||
posters recalling to gondolieri, hotel-keepers and shop-keepers, the
|
||
exact amount of money they had lost by reason of the general strike and
|
||
the wild scurry of foreigners out of the country. This rather appalling
|
||
sum was apparently a final and clinching argument, and we heard the
|
||
gratitude of the Patriarch from his balcony by San Marco expressed to
|
||
the citizens who had “saved” their country. Such incidents are symbols
|
||
of the candors and delights of the Latin temperament and of everything
|
||
in the Latin countries.
|
||
Switzerland, besides its holidaying, contributed the Bern Exposition,
|
||
the intensely significant spectacle of a nation looking at itself.
|
||
If, as was said, every Swiss schoolchild saw the exposition not once
|
||
but three times, our day was one of those times. All Switzerland was
|
||
there studying and enjoying itself. In this little epitome of its life,
|
||
one had a sense of the refreshing value of living in a small country
|
||
where its activities and spirit could all, in some sort of fashion, be
|
||
grasped, understood, contemplated, as one might a large picture. Most
|
||
suggestive, perhaps, were the great water-power development projects,
|
||
electrical engineering schemes, and mountain railroading, planned ahead
|
||
in a broad way for fifty years or so. A country that knew what it was
|
||
about, that knew how to use its resources for large social ends!
|
||
My German tour of the last two weeks of July, cut short by the war,
|
||
was more definitely sociological. I had been through the Rhine country
|
||
to Heidelberg, Stuttgart, and Munich, the preceding summer. This trip
|
||
went straight north from Friedrichshafen to Berlin. There were the
|
||
famous town-planned cities to be seen, and housing-schemes, which I had
|
||
followed rather closely in all the countries, and a general “sizing-up”
|
||
of German “Kultur.” I missed my settling down in Berlin; newspapers
|
||
and people had to be taken on the wing. But then the German spirit and
|
||
expression was much more familiar to me through study than had been the
|
||
French and Italian. My most striking impression was of the splendor of
|
||
the artistic renaissance, as shown particularly in the new architecture
|
||
and household and decorative and civic art. These new and opulent
|
||
styles are gradually submerging that fearful debauch of bad taste which
|
||
followed the French war, and which makes the business quarters of the
|
||
German cities so hideous. But the newer quarters, monuments, public
|
||
buildings of the last ten years have a massive, daring style which
|
||
marks an epoch in art. I have yet to come across an American who likes
|
||
this most recent German architecture; but to me buildings like the
|
||
University at Jena, the Stuttgart theater, the Tietz shops, etc., with
|
||
their heavy concrete masses and soaring lines, speak of perfectly new
|
||
and indigenous ideas. And if artistic creation is a mark of a nation’s
|
||
vitality, the significance of this fine flare and splurge of German
|
||
style, the endless fecundity of decorative design in printing and
|
||
furniture, etc., the application of design to the laying out of towns
|
||
and suburbs, the careful homogeneity and integrity of artistic idea,
|
||
should not be overlooked. These things are fertile, are exhilarating
|
||
and make for the enhancement of life. The Germans are acting exactly
|
||
as if they no longer believed, as we do, that a high quality of urban
|
||
life can be developed in a rag-tag chaos of undistinguished styles and
|
||
general planlessness.
|
||
Specifically, I visited the municipal workingmen’s cottages in Ulm
|
||
and saw the town-planning charts of the city in the office of the
|
||
_Stadtbaurat_; the huge apartments, municipally built and owned,
|
||
in Munich; the big _Volksbad_ in Nuremberg, and the garden-city
|
||
workingmen’s suburb at Lichtenhof, with the schoolchildrens’ garden
|
||
allotments; the model garbage-disposal plant at Furth, a miracle of
|
||
scientific resource and economy; the extraordinary model municipal
|
||
slaughter-house at Dresden, so characteristically German with its
|
||
_Schlachthof_ and _Direktorhaus_ at the entrance; and, lastly the
|
||
famous garden-city of Hellerau, inferior, however, on the whole, to
|
||
the English Hampstead Suburb at Golders Green. Towns like Rothenburg
|
||
and Nordlingen were little laboratories of mediæval and modern
|
||
town-planning. The _Stadtbaurat_ at Rothenburg went over for us the
|
||
development of the city, and gave us considerable insight into the
|
||
government, policy and spirit of a typical little German municipality.
|
||
Undemocratic in political form, yet ultra-democratic in policy and
|
||
spirit, scientific, impartial, giving the populace--who seemed to have
|
||
no sense of being excluded from “rights”--what they really wanted, far
|
||
more truly than our democracies seem to be able to secure, this epitome
|
||
of the German political scheme served to convince us that we were in a
|
||
world where our ordinary neat categories of political thought simply
|
||
didn’t apply. It was futile to attempt an interpretation in Anglo-Saxon
|
||
terms. There was no objective evidence of the German groaning under
|
||
“autocracy” and “paternalism.” One found oneself for the first time in
|
||
the presence of a government between whom and the people there seemed
|
||
to exist some profound and subtle sympathy, a harmony of spirit and
|
||
ends.
|
||
It was dramatic to sweep up through the endless billowing fields and
|
||
carefully tended forests and imposing factory towns--Germany, caught at
|
||
mid-summer, in the full tide of prosperity--and come into Berlin on
|
||
the morning of “the historic day,” July 31st, 1914, with the agitated
|
||
capital on the brink of war; to see the arrival of the Kaiser and
|
||
the princes at the Schloss; to watch the Crown Prince’s automobile
|
||
blocked twenty feet away from us by the cheering crowd;--“der _wahre_
|
||
Kriegesmann,” as the papers were calling him in contemptuous contrast
|
||
to his peaceful father; to hear the speech of the latter--grim,
|
||
staccato-voiced, helmeted figure, very symbol of war--from the balcony
|
||
of the palace; to watch next day the endless files of reservists
|
||
marching through the streets to the casernes to “einkleiden”; and
|
||
then to hear the finally fatal news of Russia’s refusal with the
|
||
swarming crowds on Unter den Linden, hysterical from both fervor and
|
||
anxiety. If ever there was a tense and tragic moment, when destiny
|
||
seemed concentrated into a few seconds of time, it was that 5 P. M. on
|
||
the afternoon of August first, at the corner of Unter den Linden and
|
||
Friedrichstrasse, in Berlin.
|
||
A midnight flight to Sweden, with a motley horde of scared Russians
|
||
and Scandinavians, and two weeks in the distressed and anxious
|
||
northern countries ended my year. Nothing but the war; regiments
|
||
of flaxen-haired Danish boys, mobilizing along the country roads of
|
||
Denmark, the _Landsturm_ lolling along the Stockholm streets, even the
|
||
Norwegians drilling against none knew what possible attack. The heavens
|
||
had fallen. An interview with Herr Branting, the Swedish Socialist
|
||
leader, and the depth of his personal feeling and the moving eloquence
|
||
with which he went over the wreck of socialist and humanitarian hopes,
|
||
gave us the vividest sense of the reverberations of the shock on a
|
||
distinguished cosmopolitan mind. The librarian of the Royal Library
|
||
in Copenhagen, the pastor of the Swedish church, and the editor of
|
||
“Dagens Nyheter,” in Stockholm, whom we were able to talk with, very
|
||
kindly answered our questions on Scandinavian affairs. And we have
|
||
the pleasantest memories of Herr Hambro in Christiania, editor of
|
||
the leading Conservative daily, who had just finished La Follette’s
|
||
autobiography, and would have preferred to talk about America even
|
||
to showing us how the Radical parties in Norway were lording it over
|
||
their opponents. One got the sense in these countries of the most
|
||
advanced civilization, yet without sophistication, a luminous modern
|
||
intelligence that selected and controlled and did not allow itself to
|
||
be overwhelmed by the chaos of twentieth-century possibility. There
|
||
was a mood of both gravity and charm about the quality of the life
|
||
lived, something rather more Latin than Teutonic. This is an intuition,
|
||
reinforced by a sense that nowhere had I seen so many appealing people
|
||
as on the streets of Copenhagen. Valid or not, it was the pleasantest
|
||
of intuitions with which to close my year.
|
||
This sketch, I find, has, in fact, turned out much more impressionistic
|
||
than I intended. But impressions are not meant to be taken as dogmas.
|
||
I saw nothing that thousands of Americans have not seen; I cannot
|
||
claim to have brought back any original contribution. There was only
|
||
the sense of intimate acquaintance to be gained, that feeling of
|
||
at-homeness which makes intelligible the world. To the University which
|
||
made possible the rare opportunity of acquaintance with these various
|
||
countries and cultures, the contact with which has been so incompletely
|
||
suggested in this sketch, my immeasurable thanks!
|
||
TRANS-NATIONAL AMERICA
|
||
No reverberatory effect of the great war has caused American public
|
||
opinion more solicitude than the failure of the “melting-pot.” The
|
||
discovery of diverse nationalistic feelings among our great alien
|
||
population has come to most people as an intense shock. It has brought
|
||
out the unpleasant inconsistencies of our traditional beliefs. We
|
||
have had to watch hard-hearted old Brahmins virtuously indignant at
|
||
the spectacle of the immigrant refusing to be melted, while they jeer
|
||
at patriots like Mary Antin who write about “our forefathers.” We
|
||
have had to listen to publicists who express themselves as stunned
|
||
by the evidence of vigorous nationalistic and cultural movements in
|
||
this country among Germans, Scandinavians, Bohemians, and Poles,
|
||
while in the same breath they insist that the alien shall be forcibly
|
||
assimilated to that Anglo-Saxon tradition which they unquestioningly
|
||
label “American.”
|
||
As the unpleasant truth has come upon us that assimilation in this
|
||
country was proceeding on lines very different from those we had
|
||
marked out for it, we found ourselves inclined to blame those who were
|
||
thwarting our prophecies. The truth became culpable. We blamed the
|
||
war, we blamed the Germans. And then we discovered with a moral shock
|
||
that these movements had been making great headway before the war even
|
||
began. We found that the tendency, reprehensible and paradoxical as it
|
||
might be, has been for the national clusters of immigrants, as they
|
||
became more and more firmly established and more and more prosperous,
|
||
to cultivate more and more assiduously the literatures and cultural
|
||
traditions of their homelands. Assimilation, in other words, instead of
|
||
washing out the memories of Europe, made them more and more intensely
|
||
real. Just as these clusters became more and more objectively American,
|
||
did they become more and more German or Scandinavian or Bohemian or
|
||
Polish.
|
||
To face the fact that our aliens are already strong enough to take
|
||
a share in the direction of their own destiny, and that the strong
|
||
cultural movements represented by the foreign press, schools, and
|
||
colonies are a challenge to our facile attempts, is not, however, to
|
||
admit the failure of Americanization. It is not to fear the failure
|
||
of democracy. It is rather to urge us to an investigation of what
|
||
Americanism may rightly mean. It is to ask ourselves whether our ideal
|
||
has been broad or narrow--whether perhaps the time has not come to
|
||
assert a higher ideal than the “melting-pot.” Surely we cannot be
|
||
certain of our spiritual democracy when, claiming to melt the nations
|
||
within us to a comprehension of our free and democratic institutions,
|
||
we fly into panic at the first sign of their own will and tendency.
|
||
We act as if we wanted Americanization to take place only on our own
|
||
terms, and not by the consent of the governed. All our elaborate
|
||
machinery of settlement and school and union, of social and political
|
||
naturalization, however, will move with friction just in so far as it
|
||
neglects to take into account this strong and virile insistence that
|
||
America shall be what the immigrant will have a hand in making it, and
|
||
not what a ruling class, descendant of those British stocks which were
|
||
the first permanent immigrants, decide that America shall be made. This
|
||
is the condition which confronts us, and which demands a clear and
|
||
general readjustment of our attitude and our ideal.
|
||
Mary Antin is right when she looks upon our foreign-born as the
|
||
people who missed the Mayflower and came over on the first boat they
|
||
could find. But she forgets that when they did come it was not upon
|
||
other Mayflowers, but upon a “Maiblume,” a “Fleur de Mai,” a “Fior di
|
||
Maggio,” a “Majblomst.” These people were not mere arrivals from the
|
||
same family, to be welcomed as understood and long-loved, but strangers
|
||
to the neighborhood, with whom a long process of settling down had
|
||
to take place. For they brought with them their national and racial
|
||
characters, and each new national quota had to wear slowly away the
|
||
contempt with which its mere alienness got itself greeted. Each had to
|
||
make its way slowly from the lowest strata of unskilled labor up to a
|
||
level where it satisfied the accredited norms of social success.
|
||
We are all foreign-born or the descendants of foreign-born, and if
|
||
distinctions are to be made between us they should rightly be on some
|
||
other ground than indigenousness. The early colonists came over with
|
||
motives no less colonial than the later. They did not come to be
|
||
assimilated in an American melting-pot. They did not come to adopt the
|
||
culture of the American Indian. They had not the smallest intention
|
||
of “giving themselves without reservation” to the new country. They
|
||
came to get freedom to live as they wanted to. They came to escape
|
||
from the stifling air and chaos of the old world; they came to make
|
||
their fortune in a new land. They invented no new social framework.
|
||
Rather they brought over bodily the old ways to which they had been
|
||
accustomed. Tightly concentrated on a hostile frontier, they were
|
||
conservative beyond belief. Their pioneer daring was reserved for the
|
||
objective conquest of material resources. In their folkways, in their
|
||
social and political institutions, they were, like every colonial
|
||
people, slavishly imitative of the mother-country. So that, in spite of
|
||
the “Revolution,” our whole legal and political system remained more
|
||
English than the English, petrified and unchanging, while in England
|
||
itself law developed to meet the needs of the changing times.
|
||
It is just this English-American conservatism that has been our chief
|
||
obstacle to social advance. We have needed the new peoples--the order
|
||
of the German and Scandinavian, the turbulence of the Slav and Hun--to
|
||
save us from our own stagnation. I do not mean that the illiterate
|
||
Slav is now the equal of the New Englander of pure descent. He is
|
||
raw material to be educated, not into a New Englander, but into a
|
||
socialized American along such lines as those thirty nationalities
|
||
are being educated in the amazing schools of Gary. I do not believe
|
||
that this process is to be one of decades of evolution. The spectacle
|
||
of Japan’s sudden jump from mediævalism to post-modernism should have
|
||
destroyed that superstition. We are not dealing with individuals who
|
||
are to “evolve.” We are dealing with their children, who, with that
|
||
education we are about to have, will start level with all of us. Let us
|
||
cease to think of ideals like democracy as magical qualities inherent
|
||
in certain peoples. Let us speak, not of inferior races, but of
|
||
inferior civilizations. We are all to educate and to be educated. These
|
||
peoples in America are in a common enterprise. It is not what we are
|
||
now that concerns us, but what this plastic next generation may become
|
||
in the light of a new cosmopolitan ideal.
|
||
We are not dealing with static factors, but with fluid and dynamic
|
||
generations. To contrast the older and the newer immigrants and see
|
||
the one class as democratically motivated by love of liberty, and
|
||
the other by mere money-getting, is not to illuminate the future. To
|
||
think of earlier nationalities as culturally assimilated to America,
|
||
while we picture the later as a sodden and resistive mass, makes
|
||
only for bitterness and misunderstanding. There may be a difference
|
||
between these earlier and these later stocks, but it lies neither
|
||
in motive for coming nor in strength of cultural allegiance to the
|
||
homeland. The truth is that no more tenacious cultural allegiance to
|
||
the mother country has been shown by any alien nation than by the
|
||
ruling class of Anglo-Saxon descendants in these American States.
|
||
English snobberies, English religion, English literary styles, English
|
||
literary reverences and canons, English ethics, English superiorities,
|
||
have been the cultural food that we have drunk in from our mothers’
|
||
breasts. The distinctively American spirit--pioneer, as distinguished
|
||
from the reminiscently English--that appears in Whitman and Emerson
|
||
and James, has had to exist on sufferance alongside of this other
|
||
cult, unconsciously belittled by our cultural makers of opinion. No
|
||
country has perhaps had so great indigenous genius which had so little
|
||
influence on the country’s traditions and expressions. The unpopular
|
||
and dreaded German-American of the present day is a beginning amateur
|
||
in comparison with those foolish Anglophiles of Boston and New York
|
||
and Philadelphia whose reversion to cultural type sees uncritically
|
||
in England’s cause the cause of Civilization, and, under the guise of
|
||
ethical independence of thought, carries along European traditions
|
||
which are no more “American” than the German categories themselves.
|
||
It speaks well for German-American innocence of heart or else for its
|
||
lack of imagination that it has not turned the hyphen stigma into a “Tu
|
||
quoque!” If there were to be any hyphens scattered about, clearly they
|
||
should be affixed to those English descendants who had had centuries of
|
||
time to be made American where the German had had only half a century.
|
||
Most significantly has the war brought out of them this alien virus,
|
||
showing them still loving English things, owing allegiance to the
|
||
English Kultur, moved by English shibboleths and prejudice. It is only
|
||
because it has been the ruling class in this country that bestowed the
|
||
epithets that we have not heard copiously and scornfully of “hyphenated
|
||
English-Americans.” But even our quarrels with England have had the
|
||
bad temper, the extravagance, of family quarrels. The Englishman of
|
||
to-day nags us and dislikes us in that personal, peculiarly intimate
|
||
way in which he dislikes the Australian, or as we may dislike our
|
||
younger brothers. He still thinks of us incorrigibly as “colonials.”
|
||
America--official, controlling, literary, political America--is
|
||
still, as a writer recently expressed it, “culturally speaking, a
|
||
self-governing dominion of the British Empire.”
|
||
The non-English American can scarcely be blamed if he sometimes
|
||
thinks of the Anglo-Saxon predominance in America as little more than
|
||
a predominance of priority. The Anglo-Saxon was merely the first
|
||
immigrant, the first to found a colony. He has never really ceased
|
||
to be the descendant of immigrants, nor has he ever succeeded in
|
||
transforming that colony into a real nation, with a tenacious, richly
|
||
woven fabric of native culture. Colonials from the other nations have
|
||
come and settled down beside him. They found no definite native culture
|
||
which should startle them out of their colonialism, and consequently
|
||
they looked back to their mother-country, as the earlier Anglo-Saxon
|
||
immigrant was looking back to his. What has been offered the newcomer
|
||
has been the chance to learn English, to become a citizen, to salute
|
||
the flag. And those elements of our ruling classes who are responsible
|
||
for the public schools, the settlements, all the organizations for
|
||
amelioration in the cities, have every reason to be proud of the
|
||
care and labor which they have devoted to absorbing the immigrant.
|
||
His opportunities the immigrant has taken to gladly, with almost a
|
||
pathetic eagerness to make his way in the new land without friction or
|
||
disturbance. The common language has made not only for the necessary
|
||
communication, but for all the amenities of life.
|
||
If freedom means the right to do pretty much as one pleases, so long as
|
||
one does not interfere with others, the immigrant has found freedom,
|
||
and the ruling element has been singularly liberal in its treatment
|
||
of the invading hordes. But if freedom means a democratic coöperation
|
||
in determining the ideals and purposes and industrial and social
|
||
institutions of a country, then the immigrant has not been free, and
|
||
the Anglo-Saxon element is guilty of just what every dominant race
|
||
is guilty of in every European country: the imposition of its own
|
||
culture upon the minority peoples. The fact that this imposition has
|
||
been so mild and, indeed, semi-conscious does not alter its quality.
|
||
And the war has brought out just the degree to which that purpose of
|
||
“Americanizing,” that is to say, “Anglo-Saxonizing,” the immigrant has
|
||
failed.
|
||
For the Anglo-Saxon now in his bitterness to turn upon the other
|
||
peoples, talk about their “arrogance,” scold them for not being melted
|
||
in a pot which never existed, is to betray the unconscious purpose
|
||
which lay at the bottom of his heart. It betrays too the possession
|
||
of a racial jealousy similar to that of which he is now accusing the
|
||
so-called “hyphenates.” Let the Anglo-Saxon be proud enough of the
|
||
heroic toil and heroic sacrifices which moulded the nation. But let
|
||
him ask himself, if he had had to depend on the English descendants,
|
||
where he would have been living to-day. To those of us who see in the
|
||
exploitation of unskilled labor the strident red _leit-motif_ of our
|
||
civilization, the settling of the country presents a great social drama
|
||
as the waves of immigration broke over it.
|
||
Let the Anglo-Saxon ask himself where he would have been if these
|
||
races had not come? Let those who feel the inferiority of the
|
||
non-Anglo-Saxon immigrant contemplate that region of the States which
|
||
has remained the most distinctively “American,” the South. Let him
|
||
ask himself whether he would really like to see the foreign hordes
|
||
Americanized into such an Americanization. Let him ask himself how
|
||
superior this native civilization is to the great “alien” states of
|
||
Wisconsin and Minnesota, where Scandinavians, Poles, and Germans have
|
||
self-consciously labored to preserve their traditional culture, while
|
||
being outwardly and satisfactorily American. Let him ask himself how
|
||
much more wisdom, intelligence, industry and social leadership has come
|
||
out of these alien states than out of all the truly American ones. The
|
||
South, in fact, while this vast Northern development has gone on, still
|
||
remains an English colony, stagnant and complacent, having progressed
|
||
culturally scarcely beyond the early Victorian era. It is culturally
|
||
sterile because it has had no advantage of cross-fertilization like
|
||
the Northern states. What has happened in states such as Wisconsin
|
||
and Minnesota is that strong foreign cultures have struck root in a
|
||
new and fertile soil. America has meant liberation, and German and
|
||
Scandinavian political ideas and social energies have expanded to a new
|
||
potency. The process has not been at all the fancied “assimilation”
|
||
of the Scandinavian or Teuton. Rather has it been a process of their
|
||
assimilation of us--I speak as an Anglo-Saxon. The foreign cultures
|
||
have not been melted down or run together, made into some homogeneous
|
||
Americanism, but have remained distinct but coöperating to the greater
|
||
glory and benefit, not only of themselves but of all the native
|
||
“Americanism” around them.
|
||
What we emphatically do not want is that these distinctive qualities
|
||
should be washed out into a tasteless, colorless fluid of uniformity.
|
||
Already we have far too much of this insipidity,--masses of people
|
||
who are cultural half-breeds, neither assimilated Anglo-Saxons nor
|
||
nationals of another culture. Each national colony in this country
|
||
seems to retain in its foreign press, its vernacular literature, its
|
||
schools, its intellectual and patriotic leaders, a central cultural
|
||
nucleus. From this nucleus the colony extends out by imperceptible
|
||
gradations to a fringe where national characteristics are all but lost.
|
||
Our cities are filled with these half-breeds who retain their foreign
|
||
names but have lost the foreign savor. This does not mean that they
|
||
have actually been changed into New Englanders or Middle Westerners. It
|
||
does not mean that they have been really Americanized. It means that,
|
||
letting slip from them whatever native culture they had, they have
|
||
substituted for it only the most rudimentary American--the American
|
||
culture of the cheap newspaper, the “movies,” the popular song, the
|
||
ubiquitous automobile. The unthinking who survey this class call them
|
||
assimilated, Americanized. The great American public school has done
|
||
its work. With these people our institutions are safe. We may thrill
|
||
with dread at the aggressive hyphenate, but this tame flabbiness is
|
||
accepted as Americanization. The same moulders of opinion whose ideal
|
||
is to melt the different races into Anglo-Saxon gold hail this poor
|
||
product as the satisfying result of their alchemy.
|
||
Yet a truer cultural sense would have told us that it is not the
|
||
self-conscious cultural nuclei that sap at our American life, but these
|
||
fringes. It is not the Jew who sticks proudly to the faith of his
|
||
fathers and boasts of that venerable culture of his who is dangerous
|
||
to America, but the Jew who has lost the Jewish fire and become a
|
||
mere elementary, grasping animal. It is not the Bohemian who supports
|
||
the Bohemian schools in Chicago whose influence is sinister, but the
|
||
Bohemian who has made money and has got into ward politics. Just so
|
||
surely as we tend to disintegrate these nuclei of nationalistic culture
|
||
do we tend to create hordes of men and women without a spiritual
|
||
country, cultural outlaws, without taste, without standards but those
|
||
of the mob. We sentence them to live on the most rudimentary planes
|
||
of American life. The influences at the center of the nuclei are
|
||
centripetal. They make for the intelligence and the social values which
|
||
mean an enhancement of life. And just because the foreign-born retains
|
||
this expressiveness is he likely to be a better citizen of the American
|
||
community. The influences at the fringe, however, are centrifugal,
|
||
anarchical. They make for detached fragments of peoples. Those who
|
||
came to find liberty achieve only license. They become the flotsam and
|
||
jetsam of American life, the downward undertow of our civilization with
|
||
its leering cheapness and falseness of taste and spiritual outlook, the
|
||
absence of mind and sincere feeling which we see in our slovenly towns,
|
||
our vapid moving pictures, our popular novels, and in the vacuous faces
|
||
of the crowds on the city street. This is the cultural wreckage of our
|
||
time, and it is from the fringes of the Anglo-Saxon as well as the
|
||
other stocks that it falls. America has as yet no impelling integrating
|
||
force. It makes too easily for this detritus of cultures. In our
|
||
loose, free country, no constraining national purpose, no tenacious
|
||
folk-tradition and folk-style hold the people to a line.
|
||
The war has shown us that not in any magical formula will this purpose
|
||
be found. No intense nationalism of the European plan can be ours.
|
||
But do we not begin to see a new and more adventurous ideal? Do we
|
||
not see how the national colonies in America, deriving power from
|
||
the deep cultural heart of Europe and yet living here in mutual
|
||
toleration, freed from the age-long tangles of races, creeds, and
|
||
dynasties, may work out a federated ideal? America is transplanted
|
||
Europe, but a Europe that has not been disintegrated and scattered
|
||
in the transplanting as in some Dispersion. Its colonies live here
|
||
inextricably mingled, yet not homogeneous. They merge but they do not
|
||
fuse.
|
||
America is a unique sociological fabric, and it bespeaks poverty of
|
||
imagination not to be thrilled at the incalculable potentialities of
|
||
so novel a union of men. To seek no other goal than the weary old
|
||
nationalism,--belligerent, exclusive, in-breeding, the poison of which
|
||
we are witnessing now in Europe,--is to make patriotism a hollow sham,
|
||
and to declare that, in spite of our boastings, America must ever be a
|
||
follower and not a leader of nations.
|
||
If we come to find this point of view plausible, we shall have to give
|
||
up the search for our native “American” culture. With the exception of
|
||
the South and that New England which, like the Red Indian, seems to
|
||
be passing into solemn oblivion, there is no distinctively American
|
||
culture. It is apparently our lot rather to be a federation of
|
||
cultures. This we have been for half a century, and the war has made
|
||
it ever more evident that this is what we are destined to remain. This
|
||
will not mean, however, that there are not expressions of indigenous
|
||
genius that could not have sprung from any other soil. Music, poetry,
|
||
philosophy, have been singularly fertile and new. Strangely enough,
|
||
American genius has flared forth just in those directions which are
|
||
least understanded of the people. If the American note is bigness,
|
||
action, the objective as contrasted with the reflective life, where
|
||
is the epic expression of this spirit? Our drama and our fiction,
|
||
the peculiar fields for the expression of action and objectivity,
|
||
are somehow exactly the fields of the spirit which remain poor and
|
||
mediocre. American materialism is in some way inhibited from getting
|
||
into impressive artistic form its own energy with which it bursts. Nor
|
||
is it any better in architecture, the least romantic and subjective
|
||
of all the arts. We are inarticulate of the very values which we
|
||
profess to idealize. But in the finer forms--music, verse, the essay,
|
||
philosophy--the American genius puts forth work equal to any of its
|
||
contemporaries. Just in so far as our American genius has expressed
|
||
the pioneer spirit, the adventurous, forward-looking drive of a
|
||
colonial empire, is it representative of that whole America of the many
|
||
races and peoples, and not of any partial or traditional enthusiasm.
|
||
And only as that pioneer note is sounded can we really speak of the
|
||
American culture. As long as we thought of Americanism in terms of the
|
||
“melting-pot,” our American cultural tradition lay in the past. It was
|
||
something to which the new Americans were to be moulded. In the light
|
||
of our changing ideal of Americanism, we must perpetrate the paradox
|
||
that our American cultural tradition lies in the future. It will be
|
||
what we all together make out of this incomparable opportunity of
|
||
attacking the future with a new key.
|
||
Whatever American nationalism turns out to be, it is certain to become
|
||
something utterly different from the nationalisms of twentieth-century
|
||
Europe. This wave of reactionary enthusiasm to play the orthodox
|
||
nationalistic game which is passing over the country is scarcely vital
|
||
enough to last. We cannot swagger and thrill to the same national
|
||
self-feeling. We must give new edges to our pride. We must be content
|
||
to avoid the unnumbered woes that national patriotism has brought in
|
||
Europe, and that fiercely heightened pride and self-consciousness.
|
||
Alluring as this is, we must allow our imaginations to transcend
|
||
this scarcely veiled belligerency. We can be serenely too proud to
|
||
fight if our pride embraces the creative forces of civilization which
|
||
armed contest nullifies. We can be too proud to fight if our code of
|
||
honor transcends that of the schoolboy on the playground surrounded
|
||
by his jeering mates. Our honor must be positive and creative, and
|
||
not the mere jealous and negative protectiveness against metaphysical
|
||
violations of our technical rights. When the doctrine is put forth that
|
||
in one American flows the mystic blood of all our country’s sacred
|
||
honor, freedom, and prosperity, so that an injury to him is to be the
|
||
signal for turning our whole nation into that clan-feud of horror
|
||
and reprisal which would be war, then we find ourselves back among
|
||
the musty schoolmen of the Middle Ages, and not in any pragmatic and
|
||
realistic America of the twentieth century.
|
||
We should hold our gaze to what America has done, not what mediæval
|
||
codes of dueling she has failed to observe. We have transplanted
|
||
European modernity to our soil, without the spirit that inflames it
|
||
and turns all its energy into mutual destruction. Out of these foreign
|
||
peoples there has somehow been squeezed the poison. An America,
|
||
“hyphenated” to bitterness, is somehow non-explosive. For, even if
|
||
we all hark back in sympathy to a European nation, even if the war
|
||
has set every one vibrating to some emotional string twanged on the
|
||
other side of the Atlantic, the effect has been one of almost dramatic
|
||
harmlessness.
|
||
What we have really been witnessing, however unappreciatively, in
|
||
this country has been a thrilling and bloodless battle of Kulturs. In
|
||
that arena of friction which has been the most dramatic--between the
|
||
hyphenated German-American and the hyphenated English-American--there
|
||
have emerged rivalries of philosophies which show up deep traditional
|
||
attitudes, points of view which accurately reflect the gigantic issues
|
||
of the war. America has mirrored the spiritual issues. The vicarious
|
||
struggle has been played out peacefully here in the mind. We have seen
|
||
the stout resistiveness of the old moral interpretation of history
|
||
on which Victorian England throve and made itself great in its own
|
||
esteem. The clean and immensely satisfying vision of the war as a
|
||
contest between right and wrong; the enthusiastic support of the Allies
|
||
as the incarnation of virtue-on-a-rampage; the fierce envisaging of
|
||
their selfish national purposes as the ideals of justice, freedom and
|
||
democracy--all this has been thrown with intensest force against the
|
||
German realistic interpretations in terms of the struggle for power and
|
||
the virility of the integrated State. America has been the intellectual
|
||
battleground of the nations.
|
||
The failure of the melting-pot, far from closing the great American
|
||
democratic experiment, means that it has only just begun. Whatever
|
||
American nationalism turns out to be, we see already that it will
|
||
have a color richer and more exciting than our ideal has hitherto
|
||
encompassed. In a world which has dreamed of internationalism, we find
|
||
that we have all unawares been building up the first international
|
||
nation. The voices which have cried for a tight and jealous
|
||
nationalism of the European pattern are failing. From that ideal,
|
||
however valiantly and disinterestedly it has been set for us, time and
|
||
tendency have moved us further and further away. What we have achieved
|
||
has been rather a cosmopolitan federation of national colonies, of
|
||
foreign cultures, from which the sting of devastating competition has
|
||
been removed. America is already the world-federation in miniature,
|
||
the continent where for the first time in history has been achieved
|
||
that miracle of hope, the peaceful living side by side, with character
|
||
substantially preserved, of the most heterogeneous peoples under the
|
||
sun. Nowhere else has such contiguity been anything but the breeder of
|
||
misery. Here, notwithstanding our tragic failures of adjustment, the
|
||
outlines are already too clear not to give us a new vision and a new
|
||
orientation of the American mind in the world.
|
||
It is for the American of the younger generation to accept this
|
||
cosmopolitanism, and carry it along with self-conscious and fruitful
|
||
purpose. In his colleges, he is already getting, with the study
|
||
of modern history and politics, the modern literatures, economic
|
||
geography, the privilege of a cosmopolitan outlook such as the people
|
||
of no other nation of to-day in Europe can possibly secure. If he is
|
||
still a colonial, he is no longer the colonial of one partial culture,
|
||
but of many. He is a colonial of the world. Colonialism has grown
|
||
into cosmopolitanism, and his motherhood is not one nation, but all
|
||
who have anything life-enhancing to offer to the spirit. That vague
|
||
sympathy which the France of ten years ago was feeling for the world--a
|
||
sympathy which was drowned in the terrible reality of war--may be the
|
||
modern American’s, and that in a positive and aggressive sense. If the
|
||
American is parochial, it is in sheer wantonness or cowardice. His
|
||
provincialism is the measure of his fear of bogies or the defect of his
|
||
imagination.
|
||
Indeed, it is not uncommon for the eager Anglo-Saxon who goes to a
|
||
vivid American university to-day to find his true friends not among
|
||
his own race but among the acclimatized German or Austrian, the
|
||
acclimatized Jew, the acclimatized Scandinavian or Italian. In them
|
||
he finds the cosmopolitan note. In these youths, foreign-born or the
|
||
children of foreign-born parents, he is likely to find many of his
|
||
old inbred morbid problems washed away. These friends are oblivious
|
||
to the repressions of that tight little society in which he so
|
||
provincially grew up. He has a pleasurable sense of liberation from
|
||
the stale and familiar attitudes of those whose ingrowing culture has
|
||
scarcely created anything vital for his America of to-day. He breathes
|
||
a larger air. In his new enthusiasms for continental literature, for
|
||
unplumbed Russian depths, for French clarity of thought, for Teuton
|
||
philosophies of power, he feels himself citizen of a larger world. He
|
||
may be absurdly superficial, his outward-reaching wonder may ignore all
|
||
the stiller and homelier virtues of his Anglo-Saxon home, but he has at
|
||
least found the clue to that international mind which will be essential
|
||
to all men and women of good-will if they are ever to save this Western
|
||
world of ours from suicide. His new friends have gone through a similar
|
||
evolution. America has burned most of the baser metal also from them.
|
||
Meeting now with this common American background, all of them may yet
|
||
retain that distinctiveness of their native cultures and their national
|
||
spiritual slants. They are more valuable and interesting to each other
|
||
for being different, yet that difference could not be creative were it
|
||
not for this new cosmopolitan outlook which America has given them and
|
||
which they all equally possess.
|
||
A college where such a spirit is possible even to the smallest degree,
|
||
has within itself already the seeds of this international intellectual
|
||
world of the future. It suggests that the contribution of America will
|
||
be an intellectual internationalism which goes far beyond the mere
|
||
exchange of scientific ideas and discoveries and the cold recording of
|
||
facts. It will be an intellectual sympathy which is not satisfied until
|
||
it has got at the heart of the different cultural expressions, and
|
||
felt as they feel. It may have immense preferences, but it will make
|
||
understanding and not indignation its end. Such a sympathy will unite
|
||
and not divide.
|
||
Against the thinly disguised panic which calls itself “patriotism”
|
||
and the thinly disguised militarism which calls itself “preparedness”
|
||
the cosmopolitan ideal is set. This does not mean that those who hold
|
||
it are for a policy of drift. They, too, long passionately for an
|
||
integrated and disciplined America. But they do not want one which is
|
||
integrated only for domestic economic exploitation of the workers or
|
||
for predatory economic imperialism among the weaker peoples. They do
|
||
not want one that is integrated by coercion or militarism, or for the
|
||
truculent assertion of a mediæval code of honor and of doubtful rights.
|
||
They believe that the most effective integration will be one which
|
||
coördinates the diverse elements and turns them consciously toward
|
||
working out together the place of America in the world-situation. They
|
||
demand for integration a genuine integrity, a wholeness and soundness
|
||
of enthusiasm and purpose which can only come when no national colony
|
||
within our America feels that it is being discriminated against or that
|
||
its cultural case is being prejudged. This strength of coöperation,
|
||
this feeling that all who are here may have a hand in the destiny of
|
||
America, will make for a finer spirit of integration than any narrow
|
||
“Americanism” or forced chauvinism.
|
||
In this effort we may have to accept some form of that dual citizenship
|
||
which meets with so much articulate horror among us. Dual citizenship
|
||
we may have to recognize as the rudimentary form of that international
|
||
citizenship to which, if our words mean anything, we aspire. We have
|
||
assumed unquestioningly that mere participation in the political life
|
||
of the United States must cut the new citizen off from all sympathy
|
||
with his old allegiance. Anything but a bodily transfer of devotion
|
||
from one sovereignty to another has been viewed as a sort of moral
|
||
treason against the Republic. We have insisted that the immigrant
|
||
whom we welcomed escaping from the very exclusive nationalism of his
|
||
European home shall forthwith adopt a nationalism just as exclusive,
|
||
just as narrow, and even less legitimate because it is founded on no
|
||
warm traditions of his own. Yet a nation like France is said to permit
|
||
a formal and legal dual citizenship even at the present time. Though a
|
||
citizen of hers may pretend to cast off his allegiance in favor of some
|
||
other sovereignty, he is still subject to her laws when he returns.
|
||
Once a citizen, always a citizen, no matter how many new citizenships
|
||
he may embrace. And such a dual citizenship seems to us sound and
|
||
right. For it recognizes that, although the Frenchman may accept the
|
||
formal institutional framework of his new country and indeed become
|
||
intensely loyal to it, yet his Frenchness he will never lose. What
|
||
makes up the fabric of his soul will always be of this Frenchness,
|
||
so that unless he becomes utterly degenerate he will always to some
|
||
degree dwell still in his native environment.
|
||
Indeed, does not the cultivated American who goes to Europe practise a
|
||
dual citizenship, which, if not formal, is no less real? The American
|
||
who lives abroad may be the least expatriate of men. If he falls in
|
||
love with French ways and French thinking and French democracy and
|
||
seeks to saturate himself with the new spirit, he is guilty of at least
|
||
a dual spiritual citizenship. He may be still American, yet he feels
|
||
himself through sympathy also a Frenchman. And he finds that this
|
||
expansion involves no shameful conflict within him, no surrender of his
|
||
native attitude. He has rather for the first time caught a glimpse of
|
||
the cosmopolitan spirit. And after wandering about through many races
|
||
and civilizations he may return to America to find them all here living
|
||
vividly and crudely, seeking the same adjustment that he made. He sees
|
||
the new peoples here with a new vision. They are no longer masses of
|
||
aliens, waiting to be “assimilated,” waiting to be melted down into
|
||
the indistinguishable dough of Anglo-Saxonism. They are rather threads
|
||
of living and potent cultures, blindly striving to weave themselves
|
||
into a novel international nation, the first the world has seen. In an
|
||
Austria-Hungary or a Prussia the stronger of these cultures would be
|
||
moving almost instinctively to subjugate the weaker. But in America
|
||
those wills-to-power are turned in a different direction into learning
|
||
how to live together.
|
||
Along with dual citizenship we shall have to accept, I think, that free
|
||
and mobile passage of the immigrant between America and his native
|
||
land again which now arouses so much prejudice among us. We shall have
|
||
to accept the immigrant’s return for the same reason that we consider
|
||
justified our own flitting about the earth. To stigmatize the alien
|
||
who works in America for a few years and returns to his own land,
|
||
only perhaps to seek American fortune again, is to think in narrow
|
||
nationalistic terms. It is to ignore the cosmopolitan significance of
|
||
this migration. It is to ignore the fact that the returning immigrant
|
||
is often a missionary to an inferior civilization.
|
||
This migratory habit has been especially common with the unskilled
|
||
laborers who have been pouring into the United States in the last
|
||
dozen years from every country in southeastern Europe. Many of them
|
||
return to spend their earnings in their own country or to serve
|
||
their country in war. But they return with an entirely new critical
|
||
outlook, and a sense of the superiority of American organization to the
|
||
primitive living around them. This continued passage to and fro has
|
||
already raised the material standard of living in many regions of these
|
||
backward countries. For these regions are thus endowed with exactly
|
||
what they need, the capital for the exploitation of their natural
|
||
resources, and the spirit of enterprise. America is thus educating
|
||
these laggard peoples from the very bottom of society up, awaking vast
|
||
masses to a new-born hope for the future. In the migratory Greek,
|
||
therefore, we have not the parasitic alien, the doubtful American
|
||
asset, but a symbol of that cosmopolitan interchange which is coming,
|
||
in spite of all war and national exclusiveness.
|
||
Only America, by reason of the unique liberty of opportunity and
|
||
traditional isolation for which she seems to stand, can lead in this
|
||
cosmopolitan enterprise. Only the American--and in this category
|
||
I include the migratory alien who has lived with us and caught the
|
||
pioneer spirit and a sense of new social vistas--has the chance to
|
||
become that citizen of the world. America is coming to be, not a
|
||
nationality but a trans-nationality, a weaving back and forth, with
|
||
the other lands, of many threads of all sizes and colors. Any movement
|
||
which attempts to thwart this weaving, or to dye the fabric any one
|
||
color, or disentangle the threads of the strands, is false to this
|
||
cosmopolitan vision. I do not mean that we shall necessarily glut
|
||
ourselves with the raw product of humanity. It would be folly to absorb
|
||
the nations faster than we could weave them. We have no duty either to
|
||
admit or reject. It is purely a question of expediency. What concerns
|
||
us is the fact that the strands are here. We must have a policy and an
|
||
ideal for an actual situation. Our question is, What shall we do with
|
||
our America? How are we likely to get the more creative America--by
|
||
confining our imaginations to the ideal of the melting-pot, or
|
||
broadening them to some such cosmopolitan conception as I have been
|
||
vaguely sketching?
|
||
We cannot Americanize America worthily by sentimentalizing and
|
||
moralizing history. When the best schools are expressly renouncing
|
||
the questionable duty of teaching patriotism by means of history, it
|
||
is not the time to force shibboleth upon the immigrant. This form of
|
||
Americanization has been heard because it appealed to the vestiges of
|
||
our old sentimentalized and moralized patriotism. This has so far held
|
||
the field as the expression of the new American’s new devotion. The
|
||
inflections of other voices have been drowned. They must be heard. We
|
||
must see if the lesson of the war has not been for hundreds of these
|
||
later Americans a vivid realization of their trans-nationality, a new
|
||
consciousness of what America means to them as a citizenship in the
|
||
world. It is the vague historic idealisms which have provided the fuel
|
||
for the European flame. Our American ideal can make no progress until
|
||
we do away with this romantic gilding of the past.
|
||
All our idealisms must be those of future social goals in which all
|
||
can participate, the good life of personality lived in the environment
|
||
of the Beloved Community. No mere doubtful triumphs of the past,
|
||
which redound to the glory of only one of our trans-nationalities,
|
||
can satisfy us. It must be a future America, on which all can unite,
|
||
which pulls us irresistibly toward it, as we understand each other more
|
||
warmly.
|
||
To make real this striving amid dangers and apathies is work for a
|
||
younger intelligentsia of America. Here is an enterprise of integration
|
||
into which we can all pour ourselves, of a spiritual welding which
|
||
should make us, if the final menace ever came, not weaker, but
|
||
infinitely strong.
|
||
Gilbert was almost six years old when they all--Mother, Olga, and
|
||
baby--went to live with Garna in her tall white house. And his
|
||
expanding life leaped to meet the wide world, with its new excitements
|
||
and pleasures. It was like a rescue, like getting air when one is
|
||
smothering. Here was space and a new largeness in things. Gilbert was
|
||
freed forever from the back-street.
|
||
Garna’s house was ridiculous but it was not despicable. For your
|
||
meals you went down into a dark basement dining-room, behind a
|
||
blacker kitchen. And the outhouse, buried in Virginia creepers and
|
||
trumpet-vine, was down a long path bordered by grape-vines, where you
|
||
went fearfully at night. Gilbert was afraid of this dark, long after
|
||
he was old enough to be ashamed that his mother must come with him and
|
||
stand protectingly outside. In winter, the stars shone at him with icy
|
||
brilliancy, and the vines made a thick menacing mass around him.
|
||
Back of the house was a pump, painted very bright and green, where the
|
||
water came up cold and sparkling and ran suddenly out of its spout
|
||
over your shoes unless you were careful. And when they had finished
|
||
pumping, the well would give a long, deep sigh, whether of fatigue
|
||
or satisfaction, Gilbert never knew. In the dark kitchen, which you
|
||
entered down a flight of stone steps, there was another pump, but it
|
||
brought forth, after long persuasion, only rain-water which to Gilbert
|
||
tasted uninteresting, and which he was not allowed to drink, but which
|
||
they carried in zinc pails up two long spidery flights, and for Aunt
|
||
Nan’s room, three, so that you could wash your face in the morning.
|
||
Only on wash-day was that pump interesting when the servant filled
|
||
great wooden tubs out of it, and created huge foamy waves in them, and
|
||
beat and rubbed, and then filled long clothes-lines with damp white
|
||
garments which coiled around you clammily and disgustingly if you ran
|
||
too close under them when you were playing.
|
||
The dining-room always had a musty smell, and was always cold in
|
||
winter, though the door into the warm kitchen was propped open with
|
||
a brick. Gilbert would eat his breakfast and run out quickly to warm
|
||
his hands at the shining black range. In the summer, it was close and
|
||
stuffy, for it was lighted only by two windows at the top which were
|
||
level with the ground and opened into a little depression, so that the
|
||
shutters would move freely. In the great thunder-storms of summer,
|
||
this hollow would fill with water and as Gilbert sat there eating his
|
||
lunch, thrilling at the loud claps and the darting lightning, the
|
||
water would begin to stream over the sill and down the walls. Then
|
||
Annie would have to be hastily called, and with many ejaculations she
|
||
would throw her apron over her head, and rush out with a dish-pan to
|
||
bail out the hollow. Gilbert would stand on a chair and see dimly
|
||
through rain-streaming panes this huge slopping figure, throwing
|
||
pails of water into the path. But ordinarily nothing happened in the
|
||
dining-room. Sometimes in the summer, an odious snail or two would come
|
||
out of the walls and leave his track across the worn carpet. In a vast
|
||
closet were stored rows of jellies which Garna had put up, and which
|
||
Gilbert and Olga would sometimes get a taste of, for a treat. Behind
|
||
the dining-room was the cellar, gratefully warm in winter with its
|
||
glowing furnace, and cool in summer with its whitewashed walls. Gilbert
|
||
loved to spend long summer afternoons there watching Annie turn the
|
||
ice-cream freezer, and waiting anxiously until the top was taken off to
|
||
be tested, and you got a taste of the fresh churned cream, or licked
|
||
the dasher when it was all over. Or sometimes, in winter while Annie
|
||
shovelled coal into the furnace, Gilbert stood fearfully by and saw the
|
||
blackish flame shoot up through the new coal. But on the whole, the
|
||
basement was not a pleasant place. The furnace, so hot when you stood
|
||
by it, sent only feeble currents of air up to the little registers that
|
||
opened into the vast rooms above. And always, the year round, there was
|
||
that musty dining-room to descend into three times a day, with its old
|
||
frayed chairs, its uncertain carpet, its stained brown walls.
|
||
Nor did the creatures who inhabited the basement attract him. Annie
|
||
changed her guise, but not her nature. And she scarcely changed her
|
||
guise. If his mother had ever had a servant in the back-street,
|
||
Gilbert did not remember it. But in Garna’s house one naturally had a
|
||
servant, and one naturally had a Polish girl. Gilbert did not at first
|
||
understand what Annie was doing in the kitchen, this queer, whitish
|
||
young woman with many skirts and vast breasts, who gave a sort of
|
||
growl-smile when you spoke to her, and always started incontinently,
|
||
with alacrity, to do something without knowing what it was. Gilbert
|
||
would come in from the garden into the fragrant kitchen on baking-day
|
||
to look for cookies, and find his mother moving about, with her
|
||
serious, anxious expression, while Annie sprawled about, cutting up
|
||
potatoes, and listening to his mother’s earnest expostulations. In
|
||
a few months there would be another Annie; her mouth was perhaps
|
||
crookeder and her hair yellower, but she would plunge clumsily about
|
||
in the same old way, and would take up her education not where the
|
||
other Annie had left off, but precisely in that brutish ignorance where
|
||
she had begun. To Gilbert’s mother, the living and successive tissue
|
||
of Annies became the absorption of life, but Gilbert was not absorbed
|
||
in Annies. They were not pretty, and they had a stale odor which
|
||
Gilbert avoided when he could. He associated the unpleasantness of
|
||
this strong, docile creature, who relapsed in each transformation to
|
||
her original brutish ignorance, with the whole unpleasantness of that
|
||
downstairs floor, the dining-room which remained always the same, whose
|
||
dull squalor nobody ever did anything to take away, for which Gilbert
|
||
could not do anything, and for which perhaps nothing could be done.
|
||
Upstairs, Gilbert liked Garna’s house better. The front parlor was a
|
||
vast and cavernous room, the mysteries of which Gilbert penetrated
|
||
only slowly. The back parlor was much more comprehensible. Here the
|
||
sun shone in, and people sat and lived. When you entered the front
|
||
parlor, you involuntarily lowered your voice, and you moved around
|
||
subdued, as if someone had died there. Garna never opened the windows,
|
||
and the shutters of the bay which looked towards the east were always
|
||
kept tightly closed. But in the back parlor on bright winter days you
|
||
sent the shade flying up to the top, and let the sun stream in over
|
||
the floor all the way to the monster of a horsehair-covered sofa which
|
||
stretched along the wall.
|
||
Horsehair made you feel almost as puckery as matting to touch it, and,
|
||
besides, you could not climb up its slippery edges very easily. And
|
||
once you were perched up there, you began to slide and slide until you
|
||
would fall in a heap ignominiously off that ungainly and inhospitable
|
||
bulk of a sofa. So you would go over and sit at Garna’s feet, as she
|
||
rocked slowly in her great chair, which you must never tip too far
|
||
back for fear of the grand-father’s clock that stood in the corner
|
||
behind it. The clock had a loud and lovely bell which struck the hours.
|
||
Gilbert could always tell when it was going to strike, for a minute
|
||
or two before the hour there was a sharp click. Then a little later
|
||
would begin a vast rumbling from the very chest of the old clock,
|
||
as if it were taking a long, deep breath for its pealing song. When
|
||
Gilbert was in the room, he always stopped and listened for the whole
|
||
long satisfactory performance. It was slow, it was prepared, it was
|
||
beautiful, and when Garna got a clock for the dining-room which rattled
|
||
off a quick little tinkle of a stroke, Gilbert despised it, and would
|
||
have covered his ears if he had not thought it would be silly.
|
||
Upstairs the rooms were just as vast. There was Mother’s room, into
|
||
which the sunlight poured, and which was the warmest in winter,
|
||
though you took turns rushing to the register to dress where it was
|
||
warm, before washing in the cold water of the wash-bowl. Just off from
|
||
Mother’s room was a little room, with nothing in it but a huge bed,
|
||
where Olga and Gilbert slept, and a dresser, in which Gilbert’s clothes
|
||
were kept. On the wall were two old pictures, one representing a donkey
|
||
in the midst of illimitable and ineffable summer pastures, and marked,
|
||
“Everything Lovely,” the other showing him in the blizzard before a
|
||
locked stabledoor, with “Nobody loves me!” Against the tall window,
|
||
at the foot of the bed, were rows and rows of shelves, on which stood
|
||
flower-pots all winter long, geraniums and begonias, and heliotrope
|
||
plants, so that they could catch the full warmth of the winter sun
|
||
and keep green for summer, when Mother took them out of the pots and
|
||
put them in rows in the garden again. The window was almost smothered
|
||
in rich greenery, and sometimes when Gilbert would wake up early on a
|
||
winter morning, when the light was just beginning to come through the
|
||
leaves, he would find that the shelves had become a black silhouetted
|
||
tracery of amazing figures. Queer outlandish heads,--fierce dragomans
|
||
with pipes in their mouths, Chinamen with queues, policemen with round
|
||
helmets, or animals such as Gilbert had seen at the Zoo--camels with
|
||
misshapen humps, elephants with long trunks, the head of a lion. It was
|
||
very startling to wake up, lying on one’s back and gazing out where
|
||
this faint light appeared in the crevices between these weird figures.
|
||
The pleasant green plants with which they had gone to bed had given
|
||
place to queer apparitions. Yet they must be plants. But how could
|
||
plants look so terrifyingly like heads? Everywhere he looked there
|
||
appeared a bristling, clear shape. The window was a vast tracery of
|
||
strangeness. Gilbert was never quite sure how real they were, and he
|
||
was always grateful when the advancing light gradually brought out the
|
||
greenness of the leaves, and finally threw them into relief, so that
|
||
the menacing head would finally dissolve into the utterly meaningless
|
||
juncture of two geranium blossoms, and the elephant trunk became a
|
||
familiar begonia frond. Then he was cheered, and he wondered how he had
|
||
ever seen anything else. No wildest forcing of his imagination could
|
||
make him see the things he had seen.
|
||
It was in this room that Gilbert’s mother put the children to bed every
|
||
night, and then took out the lamp to her room, leaving the door just
|
||
slightly ajar, so they would not be afraid. Everything was so cozy and
|
||
comfortable during the undressing. Then would come the frightening
|
||
thought, “Perhaps this comforting presence is going to be withdrawn!”
|
||
For sometimes you would wake up suddenly with a little clutch at the
|
||
heart. The dim light would be burning through the crack of the door,
|
||
but there would be a vast stillness. You knew that the house was empty,
|
||
that somehow it was the middle of a night that would never end, and
|
||
everybody, Garna, Mother, and Annie, had gone off to some distant
|
||
muffled cavern and would never come again. Olga, sleeping in a little
|
||
round ball at your side, her eyes seraphically closed, was of no avail.
|
||
The light burned steadily on, only deepening the terror of eternity,
|
||
of being lost. Should you call? What would be the use? They were
|
||
infinitely far away, in a sort of Buddha-like trance. So you cried a
|
||
little, and fell off asleep.
|
||
Or if you did not go to sleep, you waited dumbly, and, after æons of
|
||
time, you heard an unmistakable door close softly downstairs, and in a
|
||
minute Mother was looking in at you, to see if you were safe. And you
|
||
said, “Mother!” in a half-choking voice, while great waves of relief
|
||
and happiness surged through you, and you went sound asleep. So Gilbert
|
||
got in the habit of asking his mother every night whether she was going
|
||
out. And what assurance and peace there was when she said she was not!
|
||
He was safe, no matter how long the night lasted.
|
||
In Gilbert’s new house, you could go upstairs in two ways--the
|
||
front-stairs, and the back-stairs. The front-stairs were very straight
|
||
and very long and very steep, and were covered with a thick carpet.
|
||
They went straight down to a little narrow hall and the front door.
|
||
The back-stairs were crooked and narrow and covered with oil-cloth.
|
||
They ran down to a little passageway which connected the back parlor
|
||
with the “side-door,” right at the opening of the dark, steep flight
|
||
that went down into the dining-room. All these regions and passages
|
||
in Gilbert’s house had names. Gilbert soon learned that he must never
|
||
go down the front-stairs, but must always use the back ones. But one
|
||
unfortunate day, his cousin George, who was eight, showed him the
|
||
delights of sliding down the banisters, and Gilbert, although he could
|
||
never walk down the front-stairs without a feeling of the most awful
|
||
guilt, let himself be seduced into this new and amazing adventure. The
|
||
rapturous slide down the long, straight, polished wood was so safe and
|
||
gave him such a thrill that he tried it again and again. But Olga,
|
||
who by this time was all of five years old, insisted on riding too,
|
||
and threatened so instant and tumultuous a devastation of tears, that
|
||
Gilbert and George, in a panic at being discovered, held her up and,
|
||
having adjusted her little legs and cautioned her as to the way one let
|
||
one’s fingers slide along the slippery rail, let her go.
|
||
Now there was attached to the wall by a bracket a lamp, which Gilbert’s
|
||
legs just cleared, although he was always conscious of a fine potential
|
||
crash. But as Olga went slipping down the rail, it was inevitable that
|
||
she should choose just that place to fall off, which Gilbert had all
|
||
the morning been thrillingly avoiding. She fell floppily into the hall,
|
||
carrying the lamp-shade with her, and making a crash which brought
|
||
Mother and Annie from the kitchen and Garna from her room above. Then
|
||
there were tears and scoldings in a great flood, and a few reluctant
|
||
whacks; George was sent home, and the banisters were never slid on
|
||
again, at least not by Olga. Gilbert used them only as a special treat
|
||
to himself and only in his most unwatched moments. It was one instance
|
||
where his fiercely clutching guilt melted away before the thrill of
|
||
that slide.
|
||
Gilbert’s house, however, afforded few excitements. Garna’s big room
|
||
you did not often enter, though you might on Sunday while she was
|
||
putting on her veil and bonnet to take you to church. Gilbert did not
|
||
care very much how the rest of the family got to church, but it was one
|
||
of the most important things in his life that he should go with Garna.
|
||
At nine o’clock the church-bell would begin to ring, gayly, quickly,
|
||
sometimes the long peals almost falling over each other in their
|
||
eagerness. Then it would stop, with a final long echo. Now the whole
|
||
town knew that it was Sunday. Then at ten o’clock the great bell would
|
||
ring again, not quite so gayly nor so quickly, to let the people know
|
||
that there would be church that day. Then at twenty minutes after ten
|
||
the bell would begin its real earnestness,--slow and solemn strokes,
|
||
each one ringing its full sonorous note and dying away before the next
|
||
one began.
|
||
At the first stroke of the ten o’clock bell, Gilbert would rush to
|
||
Garna’s room, where he would find her putting on her black silk dress
|
||
and little lace collar. Her black bonnet with its long crêpe veil,
|
||
which Gilbert soon learned meant that grandfather was dead, would be
|
||
spread out on the bed. When the last bell began to ring, and Garna had
|
||
not yet put on her bonnet, an icy fear gripped Gilbert’s heart. They
|
||
would be late! The maddening slowness with which Garna put the last
|
||
touches to her bonnet used to send Gilbert into a delirium of anxiety.
|
||
Finally they were out on the elm-shaded streets, Gilbert fairly tugging
|
||
and straining to get them there before service began. Mother and Olga
|
||
were always late, but that was because Olga cried. He could abandon
|
||
them. He did not know what would happen to Garna and him if they were
|
||
late, but he felt that it would be something namelessly awful.
|
||
But they were never late. They would sit there in the pew several
|
||
minutes while the organ played and the great bell boomed outside, up in
|
||
the tower. Then the minister would come in, and a sense of security
|
||
and peace would steal over Gilbert, listening to the hymn and looking
|
||
up at Garna, so glossy and placid next him in the pew.
|
||
In prayer-time, Gilbert would have liked to put his head down on the
|
||
pew-rail in front of him, just as Garna and all the other people did,
|
||
but he could not reach it. So he had to be content with ducking his
|
||
head into his hand, and holding his eyes very tightly shut until he
|
||
heard the “Amen” which sent them all upright again. Why people had to
|
||
conceal their faces while they prayed Gilbert did not know, but it gave
|
||
him a very solemn feeling to keep his eyes closed, and an even more
|
||
solemn one to open them surreptitiously and look over the wilderness of
|
||
bent backs.
|
||
The ceiling was very far away, and very blue, with queer indented
|
||
squares that shot out reddish lines. Out of it came two enormous
|
||
chandeliers of brass, with a ring of lights around, which were
|
||
sometimes lighted on a dark day and made a chain of dancing lamplight.
|
||
There were galleries running down each side of the church, held up by
|
||
slender white pillars. Outside, just at the top of the pillars, ran a
|
||
narrow ledge. Gilbert’s imagination would perform perilous adventures
|
||
along that ledge. You would walk along, along, and around the back and
|
||
up the other side, dizzily perched above the congregation, clinging to
|
||
the brass rail, and you would come to the choir behind the minister’s
|
||
desk. From the ledge to the choir was a gap of a few feet, but Gilbert
|
||
saw himself jumping it, and his heart would beat faster. And then he
|
||
would return painfully, exhilaratedly, around that ledge, holding on so
|
||
tightly.
|
||
When Gilbert got tired of this play he would look up at the strange
|
||
figures that were fastened to the under side of the ledge. They looked
|
||
like playing-cards, little square raised blocks marked with black
|
||
points, at regular intervals down the gallery. Gilbert sometimes
|
||
imagined that they were really cards, and that a hooded figure moving
|
||
down the aisles would touch them with a wand, and they would lose their
|
||
frozen state and fall to the floor. From where Gilbert sat, lines went
|
||
out from him in all directions: lines of the pews, lines of the aisle
|
||
ahead which went along under the gallery, angles of the walls, lines
|
||
of the windows. Sometimes, as his gaze wandered around the church, the
|
||
line of a pillar would coincide with the line of a window, and Gilbert
|
||
would hold them there together, getting a sudden satisfaction out of
|
||
holding them in coincidence, and letting them go reluctantly, only when
|
||
his eye would mount to the queer people in the gallery, whose bonnets
|
||
and eyes and noses you could just see over the brass railing.
|
||
Sometimes in the summer when Uncle Marcus’s family was away, Garna and
|
||
Gilbert sat in their pew at the back of the gallery, a pew that was as
|
||
big as a house, with great arm-chairs and cushions for your feet. In
|
||
front of you was the clock, the face of which you could not see, for it
|
||
looked out straight towards the minister, but whose ticking you could
|
||
hear. Gilbert felt very public and self-conscious when he sat there,
|
||
under the high ceiling, with two long arms of the gallery, crowded with
|
||
its two tiers of people, stretching away on either hand. Yet it was
|
||
all very august, and religion seemed to have attained its most solemn
|
||
worthiness when you sat in Uncle Marcus’s pew.
|
||
The minister was very large and very loud, and he wore a white tie.
|
||
Gilbert did not altogether like him when he laid his moist and unctuous
|
||
hand on Gilbert’s head, as he sometimes did in Sunday School. For
|
||
after you had gone to church with Garna, you let her go home, and you
|
||
stayed to Sunday School. You went into an old brick building, which
|
||
stood a little distance from the church. The light poured through the
|
||
big windows, and you could see the lilac-bushes outside. The room swam
|
||
with very fluffy little girls, but when they had sung several hymns,
|
||
Gilbert and half a dozen other little boys were shepherded into a
|
||
corner and sat on their little chairs in a circle around Miss Fogg,
|
||
while she taught them the lesson for the day. Gilbert always knew his
|
||
golden text, and he was often the only little boy who did. Miss Fogg
|
||
would smile at him, which would make him uncomfortable, and he would be
|
||
glad when they all stood up and marched around the room to drop their
|
||
pennies into a basket which Miss Fogg held while they sang:
|
||
“Hear the pennies dropping,
|
||
Listen while they fall,
|
||
Every one for Jesus.
|
||
He will have them all.”
|
||
Gilbert did not doubt that Jesus would have them all, and he was
|
||
not in the least interested in what Jesus did with them when he had
|
||
them. It was part of the ceremony, to which you resigned yourself
|
||
unquestioningly, and when the penny-dropping was over, Gilbert ran
|
||
home as fast as he could go, to the wonderful dinner of roast beef and
|
||
potatoes that Mother had for them on Sundays.
|
||
Sunday School was a neutral, colorless event in his life. Every Sunday
|
||
as they left the Sunday School, each child would receive a little
|
||
leaflet; those who had known their golden texts would get a card with
|
||
a golden star on it. Gilbert always cried a little if he lost his card
|
||
while running home, and he cherished his leaflet for a day or two. But
|
||
he never tried to read it, and he soon mislaid his golden star. Good
|
||
boys, after they had got a prodigious number of golden stars, were
|
||
each supposed to receive as a reward a Bible all of his own. But when
|
||
Gilbert was seven years old, Garna gave him a beautiful thick black
|
||
Bible, with his name--Gilbert Shotwell Harden--stamped on the cover
|
||
in golden letters. Besides, it did not appeal to him to grub along
|
||
for a prize. Far better to have things, glorious, imposing, come to
|
||
you out of the blue sky. Once Aunt Shotwell promised him fifty cents
|
||
if he would learn the Westminster Catechism, but Gilbert never got
|
||
farther than “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him
|
||
forever.” Something obscure, unconscious, revolted in him at the base
|
||
commerciality of the transaction, and although he did not question that
|
||
this was the chief end of man indeed, he did not want to be bribed into
|
||
proclaiming it.
|
||
Things were better in the stories he learned from Miss Fogg: that Adam
|
||
had eaten the apple and been expelled from Eden; that Noah had built
|
||
and taken his cruise in the ark; that Abraham had offered up Isaac,
|
||
and Jacob served seven years; that Moses had led the Israelites into
|
||
the wilderness, and Joshua made the sun stand still; that David should
|
||
have loved Jonathan and killed Goliath; that Samson should have been
|
||
shorn of his strength, and Esther gotten Haman hanged higher than the
|
||
housetops;--all in order to teach little boys and girls to be good, to
|
||
obey their fathers and mothers and go regularly to church and Sunday
|
||
School, seemed to Gilbert entirely plausible, at least as it was
|
||
expounded by the patient and smiling Miss Fogg. He read the stories in
|
||
his new Bible, but he did not wonder much about them.
|
||
Every now and then there was a temperance lesson, when Miss Fogg
|
||
would horrify the little boys with her pictures of the evils of strong
|
||
drink. Gilbert had never seen any spirituous liquors, and he could
|
||
hardly identify them in his mind, but through the vivid and scandalized
|
||
exhortations of the minister and Miss Fogg, Gilbert conceived liquor as
|
||
a dark, evil-smelling brew, a sort of religious urine, which foul and
|
||
wicked men put into their stomachs, so that at once homes were wrecked,
|
||
and mothers and children brought to abject want. The process by which
|
||
this result arrived was vague in his mind, but the earliest genuine
|
||
crime of which he had knowledge and felt with a shuddering realization
|
||
of the existence of sin was this crime of entering a saloon, or of
|
||
drinking down wine or beer. One of the golden texts was a special
|
||
favorite with Gilbert and Olga, and she would declaim it with great
|
||
éclat, in a broad, free-verse style:
|
||
“Wine is a maw-aw-ker,
|
||
Strong drink is ray-ay-ging,
|
||
And whoever is deceived there-by-y,
|
||
Is not--wise!”
|
||
But sin, on the whole, was a very vague idea to Gilbert. He early
|
||
learned that God had sent His Son Jesus down to earth to save us from
|
||
our sins, and that this was the central fact of life. Garna told him
|
||
about it, and so did Miss Fogg, when they later had lessons in the
|
||
New Testament. We must all love God very much, and especially Jesus,
|
||
who had done so much for us. And in the solemn Sunday afternoons,
|
||
when Gilbert was told to take his Bible and sit by the window in the
|
||
back-parlor and read a chapter, he would sometimes wonder if he loved
|
||
God enough, or if he loved Jesus. God was a majestic old gentleman with
|
||
a white beard, reclining on white cumulus clouds, and Jesus he knew
|
||
equally well as a young man in an archaic blue robe, holding a lamb in
|
||
one arm, and followed by others. He had seen their pictures long ago,
|
||
and whenever either of them was mentioned, these images popped into his
|
||
mind, faintly colored by a sense of awe, as in the case of God, and of
|
||
tenderness, as in the case of Jesus. But did he love them? The pastor
|
||
was certainly a very poor caricature of God, and yet with his beard and
|
||
square head and loud words, there must be a faint resemblance. Gilbert
|
||
certainly did not like him.
|
||
Much more nearly like God was his father’s father, whom he had once
|
||
been taken to see and whom he remembered now as a white-haired,
|
||
white-bearded man, very solemn, and yet with something cold and
|
||
repellent about him whenever Gilbert had touched him. Gilbert did not
|
||
feel that he loved this God, and yet he knew that he ought to, that it
|
||
was the most important thing in life that he could do. So he would sit
|
||
there and try to screw his heart into an attitude of loving. He would
|
||
grow very serious and tighten his muscles, and fix his thought on the
|
||
majesty reclining on the white cloud, and, pretty soon, he would feel
|
||
that indeed he now loved God, and he would be kept from sin. Jesus, who
|
||
was tenderer, he might have found easier to love, but for the fact of
|
||
those lambs. Gilbert had never seen young men carrying lambs, and the
|
||
picture, whose authenticity he did not question, aroused no emotion
|
||
within him. But after he had come to love God, he tightened his heart
|
||
towards the benignant being in the blue robe.
|
||
He was always present, because before every meal they would all put
|
||
down their heads, so that they breathed upon their plates, and they
|
||
would ask Jesus to bless their food. Sometimes Gilbert would say it,
|
||
sometimes Olga, and the food unblessed would have tasted bad in their
|
||
mouths. Gilbert would have had a vague presentiment of something evil.
|
||
Did Garna and Mother love God? Garna must, because every day she would
|
||
put on her gold-rimmed spectacles and read a chapter in her Bible, and
|
||
mother would kneel down with Gilbert and Olga at night while they said
|
||
their prayers, and often murmur something fervently with them. The
|
||
prayers, they understood, were addressed directly to God in heaven,
|
||
and were necessary if you were to show your gratitude to the Heavenly
|
||
Father and ensure for yourself a peaceful and secure night. You asked
|
||
God also to bless all those people you were fond of, and you knew that
|
||
if they should die before they woke, their souls also would be taken to
|
||
Heaven with yours.
|
||
If it was only with painful effort that Gilbert in his early days of
|
||
church and Sunday School loved God and Jesus, whom did he love? Did he
|
||
love Mother? He did not know. He loved her very much at night when he
|
||
felt her protecting presence in the house, but in the daytime she was
|
||
a strange being who did not seem interested in Gilbert and Olga. She
|
||
spent most of her time with little brother, or, if he were asleep, she
|
||
would be lying stretched across the foot of the bed, with her face in
|
||
her hands. Often there were tears in her eyes, and if Gilbert wanted
|
||
her to do something for him, she would say piteously that she was not
|
||
well. There were no more walks on the village green, but this did not
|
||
make any difference to Gilbert, for the wonderful yard in which Garna’s
|
||
house stood was a region that could never be explored or exhausted.
|
||
The one person that Gilbert knew he loved was Garna. You could not
|
||
always see her, for she would be shut up in her room; but when you were
|
||
let in, how inexhaustible she was, how comfortable you felt, playing
|
||
about on the floor while Garna sat always by the window, sewing, always
|
||
sewing, looking so wise and jolly and good out of her gold-rimmed
|
||
spectacles. Garna was always the same, and always good to be with and
|
||
look upon. Gilbert loved to sit in her lap, and touch her hair, brushed
|
||
to such silky smoothness and parted in the middle. As she bent over, he
|
||
would run both hands back over it from her forehead, and laugh as she
|
||
laughed and pretended to arrange it again.
|
||
Gilbert liked to have Garna all to himself, and it was fortunate
|
||
that Olga was not much interested in Garna. She did not seem to half
|
||
appreciate her or her wonderful room. But once in a while she would
|
||
take a perverse desire to come in with Gilbert when he went to see
|
||
Garna. Olga would have to be prevented with all his weight and force.
|
||
How could he stand so outrageous an invasion of his rights? And Olga
|
||
would probably hit him, concentrating all her round little pugnacity
|
||
into one stout blow, and Gilbert would hit back, and Olga would scream,
|
||
and Mother would come running, and there would be many tears, and Eden
|
||
would be spoiled, if not altogether denied him, for that afternoon. On
|
||
the very threshold, Olga, who did not really care to be with Garna, had
|
||
ruined his day with her! Hateful little Olga! And all the time, Garna
|
||
would be inside, behind the closed door, serene, unheeding, letting
|
||
her daughter, Gilbert’s mother, settle the whole affair, as far away
|
||
as if she were in Pampelune. Gilbert felt the perversity of Fate, the
|
||
inexorable aloofness of the gods, the fragility of happiness. Going
|
||
eagerly to taste this sweet exhilaration of an afternoon with Garna,
|
||
the cup, without any warning whatever, would be fatally dashed from
|
||
his lips. But he could not have it shared with Olga!
|
||
Between Garna’s chair and the window was a high, chintz-colored box
|
||
which opened into a voluminous cavern of sheets and white things. In
|
||
the corner just behind Garna’s chair was the tall secretary-desk, with
|
||
its big doors above that opened on shelves full of books, and its heavy
|
||
writing-lid which folded down and rested horizontally on two supports
|
||
that pulled out on each side. You could sit on the high chintz-box
|
||
and write on the secretaire. Gilbert thought this was one of the most
|
||
satisfactory spots in the whole world. At your right was the window
|
||
looking down through the black-walnut trees to the street below; just
|
||
behind you sat Garna, busily knitting or sewing; you had all the flat,
|
||
shiny surface of the lid to make your puzzles on, or practise writing,
|
||
or draw on; your legs hung down over the chintz-box, high above the
|
||
ground; you were shut in to the most delicious privacy. At the back
|
||
of the secretaire were innumerable compartments and pigeon-holes in
|
||
which Garna kept her letters and papers; there were old diaries and
|
||
account-books, which Gilbert puzzled over, and one compartment Garna
|
||
gave Gilbert for his very own, so that he could keep his pencils and
|
||
paper there, and anything he chose, safe for ever from the depredations
|
||
of the marauding Olga, who seemed to Gilbert, whenever he thought of
|
||
her at all from his safe retreat, as a very imp of lawlessness, of
|
||
restless and devastating mischief. Sometimes, to make sure that no one
|
||
interrupted him, he would silently turn the keys in the doors. But
|
||
Garna did not like that very much, and it was awkward if Mother or Aunt
|
||
Nan really came and wanted to come in, and Garna had to wonder how the
|
||
doors could ever have become locked.
|
||
In the summer afternoons Garna would take her waist off, and sit
|
||
sewing in her bare arms. Gilbert liked to lean over and rub his face
|
||
against the expanse of cool flesh, lay his head on the cool shoulder,
|
||
and listen to Garna’s stories of when she was a little girl. Gilbert
|
||
learned about her father’s house in Burnham, which he should some day
|
||
see, but it was a long distance from where they lived now; about his
|
||
mill-pond and his mill, where great mahogany logs that came from the
|
||
West Indies were sawed up for furniture; about the canal that was dug,
|
||
when she was a little girl, through their very front yard, and on
|
||
which they saw the very first boat sail grandly by, the grandfather of
|
||
those boats that Gilbert had loved to watch from the porch of the house
|
||
in the back-street, and which he had almost forgotten now that he had
|
||
come to live with Garna.
|
||
So he would lean there against her arm, stroking her plump elbow with
|
||
its dimples that so fascinated him, and listening to her stories until,
|
||
in the drowsy summer air, he sank away indistinctly, and knew nothing
|
||
until he woke up towards supper-time on Garna’s high bed. Every now
|
||
and then, as a great distinction and event, Gilbert would be allowed
|
||
to sleep with Garna. How different and solemn it was from any other
|
||
sleep! When Gilbert said good-night to Garna in her big chair in the
|
||
back-parlor, it was with a “I’m going to sleep with you to-night!” Then
|
||
he would get, not into the hard little bed with Olga, but into the
|
||
great feathery soft bed in Garna’s room. He would sink off to sleep in
|
||
billows and oceans of soft pillows and sheets. Along towards morning
|
||
he would half wake, perhaps, and there would be the huge, comforting,
|
||
dear presence of Garna filling the bed beside him, as he lay pressed
|
||
against her warm night-gown. And when he woke again, Mother would be
|
||
there standing by the side of the bed, and she would whisk him off to
|
||
her room to be dressed. And life would go on as before.
|
||
Aunt Nan seemed to love Garna as much as Gilbert did. And she liked
|
||
Gilbert. Often, on summer days, she would take him up to her room
|
||
in the third-story, a region to which Gilbert never ventured alone,
|
||
for there were queer, pitchy-black closets and alcoves that led far
|
||
back under the sloping roof, and contained trunks and boxes, in which
|
||
and behind which you never knew what menacing forces of evil might
|
||
be hidden. At the top of the stairs was a little hall, lighted by a
|
||
sky-light, through which you saw the blue sky. Aunt Nan’s room was
|
||
shaped like an L, but the ceiling on one side ran down so steeply that
|
||
Gilbert could stand against the wall and touch the line where it joined
|
||
the ceiling. Aunt Nan would fix up a pallet on the floor, soft and
|
||
comfortable, and on hot days Gilbert would roll half-naked on it, while
|
||
Aunt Nan rubbed his hot arms with a sweet-smelling balsam. Then she
|
||
would sit and read a great shiny new book, which Gilbert spelled out
|
||
as “Psychology. James.” She had several books on shelves over her desk,
|
||
and a great bunch of programs stuck together on an iron hook that hung
|
||
on the wall. In the winter Aunt Nan was not in the house. Mother said
|
||
she was a teacher, and lived in New York.
|
||
Aunt Nan was very tall and slender and very straight, and she had very
|
||
black hair that came over her forehead in a kind of bang. She always
|
||
wore black and white dresses, and she always had a bright fierceness
|
||
about her that Gilbert liked. She was several years younger than
|
||
Mother, and she was very proud. There was a stiff exhilaration in her
|
||
walk and in her laugh that daunted Gilbert a little, but made him like
|
||
to be with her. Sometimes she would put the tennis-net across the green
|
||
lawn and play with a neighbor, darting so swiftly, like a long black
|
||
bird, across the green, hitting the ball so straight and true, and
|
||
blazing so fiercely with her black eyes when she missed, that Gilbert
|
||
sat enthralled, motionless, until the set was over and they went in
|
||
to supper. On those days he would help her mark the court, going to
|
||
the little barn and watching her fill the marker with white powdery
|
||
lime, and then helping her push it over the closely-mown grass. The
|
||
long summer days were full of Aunt Nan. She loved the garden, with its
|
||
flower-beds, and she loved to see the paths all clipped and weeded and
|
||
raked. Once a week, a black man would come from somewhere, and spend
|
||
the whole day with Aunt Nan, mowing the lawn, digging the vegetable
|
||
garden, and weeding the flowers. That was a glorious day for Gilbert
|
||
and for Aunt Nan. How much there was to be done. They all seemed to be
|
||
wrestling with the whole yard, to turn it up, to bring it to a bright,
|
||
shiny newness. At the end of the day, Gilbert would walk about the
|
||
garden on the gravelly paths with Aunt Nan to survey their handiwork.
|
||
She would be immensely contented. Her bright black eyes would soften;
|
||
she would be weary and her hands would be dirty, but Gilbert would feel
|
||
the peace that radiated from her at the sight of this freshly burnished
|
||
garden. The grass would be smooth like a carpet, the flower-beds and
|
||
the vegetable-garden all dark and tumbled with their upturned earth.
|
||
The paths would be straight brown indented tracks, or, where they went
|
||
around the house, beautifully curved tracks, with the marks of the
|
||
rake on the fine earth where George had worked it over. During the week
|
||
the grass would grow longer, the weeds shoot up in the flower-beds,
|
||
the paths become bedraggled at the edges, the grass grow up rank on
|
||
the lawns. But soon Saturday would come with George, and the fine
|
||
renovation would take place all over again.
|
||
Aunt Nan was neat and quick in her movements. She had a cold scorn for
|
||
dirty faces and dirty hands, and Gilbert sometimes became a little
|
||
weary trying to satisfy her demands. He was always a little intimidated
|
||
by her, but at the same time fascinated by her vibrancy, her restless
|
||
passion. He loved to see her coming towards him, because he knew that
|
||
she would snatch him away to something interesting. But he was a little
|
||
fearful, too; subdued by that decisiveness that made him realize how
|
||
little what he wanted would count. She did not kiss or fondle Gilbert
|
||
much. She would take him on her lap and put her arms around him.
|
||
Mother was never like that. She did not seem to know what she wanted.
|
||
Every incident was a crisis. Gilbert found that he and Olga could
|
||
resist her by delaying. Dirty faces could be grudgingly and slowly
|
||
cleaned. One could come in the utmost disapproving reluctance when one
|
||
was called. Mother was always distressed that you did not obey her; she
|
||
was always distressed about what to do with you. She would implore you
|
||
to be good, and you would be good with a certain chilly haughtiness,
|
||
because it seemed somewhat humiliating to see Mother so distressed and
|
||
uncertain. Olga did not usually obey, but kicked and screamed. Gilbert
|
||
soon got the habit of ignoring his mother’s expressed desires and
|
||
wearing out her decisiveness. Then he would be left alone to follow his
|
||
own desires.
|
||
That yard, which Aunt Nan loved so much, was for Gilbert a domain,
|
||
a principality. It was years before he had really explored it
|
||
thoroughly or searched out all its delights. At first it was a rich and
|
||
bountiful collection of all the things that Gilbert had missed in the
|
||
back-street. He did not know that he had missed them, but now that he
|
||
had found them, something down very deep in him told him that this was
|
||
what his restlessness and sadness had craved.
|
||
You rushed out the side-door--for the front door was just as heavily
|
||
interdicted as the front stairs--and you tumbled into a bed of myrtles
|
||
and wistaria which climbed out of the flower-bed in thick stalks and
|
||
grew steadily over the corner of the house. Across the path were two
|
||
tall pine trees, whose branches brushed Gilbert’s shutter by his bed
|
||
when the wind blew loud. Beyond the trees lay the green, unbroken lawn,
|
||
covered with velvety grass that even the lawn-mower could not keep from
|
||
growing thick and soft like a carpet. The lawn went straight up towards
|
||
the neighbor’s fence, but just before it reached there it turned into
|
||
a long flower-bed, with rose-bushes and tangled flowery vines that
|
||
climbed over and pretended that there was no fence there at all. To the
|
||
right, and up near the street corner of the yard were three more lordly
|
||
pines set in a triangle, which Gilbert had promptly named “Three Trees
|
||
Grove.” The floor was covered with needles. It was shady and spacious,
|
||
almost as big as Gilbert’s room. It could be turned into a house, or a
|
||
shop or a church, at a moment’s notice. The big trunks stretching up
|
||
above Gilbert’s head gave it an air of delightful majesty, and he could
|
||
not play there enough with Olga and Cousin Ethel.
|
||
At the other end of the broad lawn were the grape-arbors, six or
|
||
seven lines of them, where you walked between the overflowing vines
|
||
and looked longingly at the green bunches which took endless æons, all
|
||
through the long golden summer, to ripen, while Gilbert went every day
|
||
to examine them. Behind that was the barn, from which the horses and
|
||
carriage had vanished, though when Grandfather was alive, Garna told
|
||
him, they had their horses and Aunt Nan had ridden one of them, and so
|
||
had Uncle Rob, who was far off in Texas now. Gilbert could see traces
|
||
of the carriage road which had led out through the side-gate to the
|
||
side-street, but which was now all grass-grown. The barn was now full
|
||
of rakes and hoes and wheel-barrows, but there were deep bins where
|
||
still remained a peck or two of oats and a measure, and there was a
|
||
manger which swung back and forth from the stall to the bin, so you
|
||
could fill it and then turn it in to the horse. Gilbert wished that
|
||
there were still horses to play with, but it was fun turning the manger
|
||
and making Olga and Ethel pretend to be horses.
|
||
If you went on beyond the barn you came to a clump of currant and
|
||
gooseberry bushes which ran out in a thin line to the fence, which by
|
||
this time had lost its rose-bushes and become a prickly tangle of
|
||
blackberries. Enclosed by the blackberries and the currants was the
|
||
broad expanse of the vegetable garden, with corn in summer that Gilbert
|
||
could get quite lost in, and an amazing variety of good vegetables to
|
||
eat. The vegetable garden ran up to Uncle Marcus’s barn and his garden.
|
||
Straight down back of Garna’s house, through the middle of the yard,
|
||
ran a path, part way through a grape-arbor of its own, and then past
|
||
the currant bushes. At the end of the garden it joined a path in Uncle
|
||
Marcus’s yard. Along the foot of the path, where it passed the garden,
|
||
was a row of rhubarb, and on the other side Aunt Nan’s sweet-peas,
|
||
which she planted every spring. On the other side of the path was an
|
||
open meadow where the grass was not cut, and where Gilbert sometimes
|
||
lay on cool summer days and looked up at great white clouds floating
|
||
past in the blue sky. Nearer the house you came to a wilderness of
|
||
fruit-trees, pears of all kinds and apples, and as you approached the
|
||
street the yard broke into flower-beds and shrubs and bushes. Close to
|
||
the house grew lilies-of-the-valley, and a curious ribbon-grass which
|
||
Aunt Nan could take between her fingers and blow shrill whistles on.
|
||
Along the path which went past the dining-room window were beds of pink
|
||
and white peonies and tall white lilies which had a smell so sweet that
|
||
Gilbert felt almost faint when he touched them. And along the whole
|
||
side of the yard was a beautiful japonica hedge, with its white and
|
||
red flowers in the spring, which turned into sweetly smelling green
|
||
balls in the summer. There were great maples interspersed in the hedge
|
||
that threw down their keys in the spring. And all along the front of
|
||
the yard, close to the house, ran a white wooden fence just within
|
||
which was a line of graceful black-walnut trees, with their thin green
|
||
clustered leaves and the green nuts which fell in heaps on the ground.
|
||
Aunt Nan and Gilbert would collect them in sacks and put them in the
|
||
barn. There they would grow all black, so that you could strip off the
|
||
covering and find the crinkled nutshell within. Then you cracked them
|
||
on a stone.
|
||
The yard was wonderful to Gilbert. The winter was one long torpor
|
||
when, as he played with his blocks in the great stretch of sunlight in
|
||
Mother’s room, the days passed almost in a dream. It was only when
|
||
spring came, and he could run about and see the buds and the flowers
|
||
come out one after another, that he felt alive again. And it was good
|
||
in the endless summer days to have so much to attend to. He could be
|
||
playing in Three Trees Grove, and yet have running in an undercurrent
|
||
of his mind the sense of the garden or the japonica hedge, or the
|
||
manger in the barn. He could go down to the cherry-tree to see if the
|
||
cherries were ripe, or to the currant-bushes, or he could prick his
|
||
fingers on the rose-bushes, or get himself stuck in the gum of the
|
||
pine-trees. The yard was a world, and only very dimly did he imagine
|
||
anything beyond it. What his mother did in the kitchen or about the
|
||
house only very dimly concerned him. What they had to live on never
|
||
entered his mind. His sorrows were concerned almost entirely with the
|
||
rebellions of Olga, or the calamities of weather which would keep
|
||
them all home from a walk to the kind lady who lived up the street
|
||
and gave them cookies when they went to see her. Or the hornets and
|
||
yellow-jackets. Sometimes on very hot days, when Mother kept them
|
||
in the darkened back parlor and the big clock ticked menacingly,
|
||
insistently at them, and Gilbert felt sleepy and could not go to
|
||
sleep, the tædium vitæ would overwhelm him in a great drenching wave.
|
||
He was suddenly conscious of time, endlessly flowing and yet somehow
|
||
dreadfully static. Nothing was ever going to happen again; he was as if
|
||
alive in a tomb. The flies buzzed; the clock ticked; Mother was taking
|
||
an exhausted nap; Aunt Nan and Garna were away for a vacation. The
|
||
world was a great vacuum with nothing to experience and nothing to do.
|
||
And if a summer afternoon could produce so appalling a sense of
|
||
eternity, what must heaven be like, where you went so infallibly when
|
||
you were dead? Either because lovely Garna and mild Miss Fogg had kept
|
||
Gilbert from the terrors of hell, or it was his natural ego, it never
|
||
occurred to him that he was not destined for heaven, or that there
|
||
was any way of avoiding it. And the thought of eternal life seemed
|
||
to fuse itself with the long and empty summer afternoon. The tædium
|
||
vitæ was transmuted into the colossal ennui of heaven. Not as a pearly
|
||
municipality of golden streets and white-robed choirs did Gilbert
|
||
imagine heaven, but always in the guise of those white clouds on which
|
||
God rode. He saw himself clearly, seated infinitely high above the
|
||
earth, to which he should never be able to come again. Perhaps there
|
||
was the intimation of a harp, but what seized Gilbert’s imagination
|
||
was the vast emptiness of the space around him, the disorientation
|
||
of everything. Time and space were no longer fluid and mobile, but
|
||
frozen; and in the hot, sticky afternoon, his slightly feverish body,
|
||
all alert and sensitive at every pore of time that dripped past him,
|
||
would be terribly conscious of this horror that awaited him, of this
|
||
immobile time in empty space. It was not the dark or stillness that he
|
||
feared. On the contrary, he saw this future state as floating in the
|
||
clearest, most luminous light. On certain days, when he happened to
|
||
look at the sky, he would see just that pale infinite blue into which
|
||
you could look on and on and never reach the end. When it was really
|
||
blue or cloudy, it curved comfortingly over you, near and definite like
|
||
a bowl. But when it was of a certain paleness, the bowl seemed to have
|
||
been removed and you looked through, out into nothingness. And if in
|
||
this nothingness there were white majestic clouds floating, that looked
|
||
solid as if they could bear you away, then over Gilbert would sweep
|
||
again this ennui of heaven, lost and forgotten perhaps since that last
|
||
afternoon in the darkened parlor. And a vague feeling of homelessness
|
||
and of fear would fall upon him. His play would flag until the clouds
|
||
drifted away again and he forgot that they had come.
|
||
The first break in Gilbert’s world came when his mother decided that he
|
||
and Olga ought to go to school. Gilbert was seven years old, and when
|
||
his mother told him rather worriedly about it, he felt at first rather
|
||
pleased at the idea of something so important. What would they teach
|
||
him? Mother said Miss Waldron would teach him. He knew how to read and
|
||
write and he could spell all the words he wrote. He read all the books
|
||
he was given and sometimes looked into Hawthorne’s Wonder Tales, and
|
||
read a page or two. When he went back for the book, however, he would
|
||
forget where he had left off. So he would read a page anywhere. What
|
||
did it matter? He read his Bible in the same haphazard way. He knew his
|
||
multiplication table, and he liked to recite it. And he knew all about
|
||
the calendar and the hymn-book. Most of these things he had known
|
||
since he was four or five, and what good did they do him?
|
||
But in the morning he liked taking Olga by the hand, and leading her
|
||
out the gate under the big black-walnut trees, and down the street.
|
||
Mother always kissed them good-bye with such a serious and anxious
|
||
air that Gilbert felt he was setting out on a genuine mission. At
|
||
the crossing he would restrain Olga from rushing ahead; then he
|
||
would carefully look up and down the street to see if there were any
|
||
horses and wagons coming. Then he would dash across, pulling Olga
|
||
precipitately behind him. They would go along the upper green, under
|
||
the great railroad bridge, and come to Miss Waldron’s.
|
||
To Gilbert the school was an enormous joke. He could not take Miss
|
||
Waldron seriously. Her tall, bony frame and her sad, fierce eyes
|
||
touched no springs of affection in him. A lesson or two unlocked all
|
||
the latent cruelty in him. She was there to teach Gilbert and Olga
|
||
and the half-dozen other little children who came to the school-room
|
||
over the kitchen, and she was determined to teach them. She knew that
|
||
children under seven needed to be taught to read and write and spell.
|
||
So she gritted her teeth, and came every morning to her hard and bitter
|
||
work.
|
||
But Gilbert by that time had read so many books at home that it seemed
|
||
absurd that he should be taught to read, and he would rattle through
|
||
the lesson while the younger children fidgeted and then tried painfully
|
||
to puzzle it out. Gilbert could spell, too, and he raced through the
|
||
words, and when he was asked the meaning of words he would say that
|
||
“retire” meant “go to bed,” because he had seen it mean that in a book
|
||
he had read. And Miss Waldron would say he was a saucy boy, and plead
|
||
with him to answer nicely. Then he would mimic her, and watch her fight
|
||
back the temper in her sad, fierce eyes. She would stand him in the
|
||
corner, with his back to the class, and he would look round and wink
|
||
at the other children to make them laugh. Miss Waldron’s sisters would
|
||
come up from the kitchen below, where they were baking, and beg Gilbert
|
||
not to make the teacher so unhappy, and promise him a cookie if he
|
||
would be good. And Gilbert, drunk with power, would refuse everything,
|
||
and ride his high horse until the mill-whistles blew twelve o’clock,
|
||
and they all went home for the day. |